


The Zeitgeist Set

by Kehuan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Spider-Man: Far From Home, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Grimdark Cozy Catastrophe, Angst, Anti-Hero Quentin Beck, Gen, Gender-Swapped Minor Character, Guilt, Multiverse, Mysterio Cannot Catch A Break, Spiral Into Moral Ambiguity, redemption arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-10-26 11:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 27,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20741321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kehuan/pseuds/Kehuan
Summary: By the time high-tech vigilante Tony Stark dies curing an ecoterrorist’s designer plague, his hero fad has laid waste to New York City, sparked a minor civil war, and ruined Quentin Beck’s life. Beck is sick of heroes. With a hologram prototype and an audacious backstory, written by an ex-girlfriend whose name he’s never learned, he might be the greatest one yet.Soon, Beck’s faked heroics put him on the radar of a disgraced government agency. He’s paired up with an angsty teen whose powers include wall-climbing, web-slinging, and covert drone strikes. But as he patches over each old lie, it’s getting harder to keep track of the truth — and more obvious how much fallout his stories can have.Or: TheFar From HomeAU where superpowers are hard to get, fixing things is harder than breaking them, and even the smartest guy in the room can’t control what people want to believe.





	1. Cities In Dust

“Everything is so completely wrong here.”

The bar’s single window looked up onto the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue. The bartender glanced out of it through steel-rimmed glasses with a single too-bright eye, then back to Quentin Beck.

“It looks okay to me,” she said. “Unless you're talking about the picture.”

She raised her eyebrows and glanced at the faded portraits that lined the room: Reagan, De Niro, Steve Rogers. The glass on the photo after that was still cracked.

“I should have kicked you out,” she told Beck. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”

The woman hadn't been working when Beck first stumbled into the bar four years ago, the afternoon he was fired from Stark Industries — numb and furious and not quite managing not to cry. She'd been there last week on the anniversary of it, when he’d gotten drunk on house vodka and tried to put his fist through the signed photograph of Tony Stark.

“Sorry.” Beck tried to fake a smile. “I came to pay for it.”

“Don’t worry about it. You seemed pretty messed up.”

He would have coped if the couple next to him hadn’t kept talking about the Stark memorial. The man had been dead six goddamn months. They should have been able to talk about _literally anything else_.

“I’m fine now,” he said. After almost half a decade he’d gotten better at disguising bitterness in his voice, although better still wasn’t _good_. He should savor the stroke of luck, though. He only had one job this week, and he’d be barely making rent even without paying to fix up Stark’s face. Not even a proper portrait — just a tacky collage with his real visage overlaid on a flight suit helmet, probably signed with a stamp.

“Come on, I’ll make you a drink,” the bartender said. “We’ve got a new thing this week.”

“Sure.” He was early for the job anyway — might as well kill time.

She nodded and pushed her glasses up. Two of her fingers ended in smooth nubs on the same side as her darkened lens. Maybe she’d lost them in the Chitauri incident, or one of the fights in the Accords… there were really too many possibilities to guess. Beck looked away before she could see him staring, until she slid a dark and smoking glass across the bar. He started to pick it up. She swatted his hand away.

“Shit – just wait till it boils off, okay? That's liquid nitrogen. It'll punch a hole right through your stomach.”

Beck nodded and tipped the glass gently, watching steam roll off its edges. “Why use it?”

“Chills the glass fast. And makes it look like a witch cauldron or something. People like the illusion.”

“Huh.” The drink stilled, leaving behind a rust-colored liquid mirror. It tasted like dirty rain after a bad fight in Manhattan. “It’s good.”

Had the air tasted a little like this when Stark fired him? He’d done it during the Accords, but Beck hadn’t processed anything that day — except for the fact that his life was gone. He’d given the company everything he had, and it hadn’t been enough, because some rich dilettante couldn’t use it in a fistfight. Not a dilettante who was even smarter than Beck, or more ambitious. Just one with a tycoon father and a few billion dollars in blood money.

That was what money bought you: inevitability disguised as talent.

“So you still wanna talk about how everything is wrong?”

“Sure, why not?” It had been a stupidly melodramatic comment, especially to deliver sober — but what else were bars for in the afternoon? “Our whole generation is stuck playing the extras in a bunch of rich jerks’ psychodramas. And the kids after us are growing up desperately hoping they’ll be good enough to get a line or two. People like Tony Stark get idolized for solving some flashy problem they probably created in the first place, over and over. We get one shot. One try. And if somebody fucks it up for us, we’re gone.”

The bartender laughed nervously. “Man, did Tony Stark kill your parents or something?”

“Oh for _Christ's_ sake.” She might as well have jammed a pin into a rotten tooth. “He took my life's work and turned it into a toy. He fired me with a non-compete clause in the middle of a goddamn war.” He took a drink to make himself quit talking. It was a looping tape now, his litany of complaints. “But no. He did not technically give me the family-killing seal of revenge approval.”

“Well, I don’t know why you think you get one shot. You could probably even do hero stuff if you wanted. Tell your story. Start a community fund.”

Grab the pin; stab it deep. “I'm not a hero.”

“You could look like a hero.” She put her elbows on the bar and ostentatiously ran her eye over his face. “You've got the jawline.”

“I don't care.” He should, he told himself — if she was flirting with him, he should at least reciprocate enough to get his tab paid.

“You never wanted to be one? Not even once?”

“Never.” Through the pulp, down the root, into the gums. He wouldn't take her money even if she offered. “Not even once.”

He shouldn’t have come here. If he’d been smart he’d have left New York years ago. Found some backwater town where he’d never have to think about Stark again, except on the occasional TV segment and on Halloween, when the kids came out in their Iron Man costumes. _Why’d you leave New York?_ somebody would ask at a job interview or a blind date. And he’d tell them: _Because of all the goddamn heroes._

***

Beck walked. He still remembered the last days of what he might have called Megamall Manhattan — sterile, cheerful, alive. His Stark internship had started two years after the First Battle of New York, during that brief period where the Chitauri Corporation’s bloody attempt at a real estate takeover seemed like a fluke event.

He should have seen it as a warning sign, because now he lived in Disaster Theme Park New York, where the city had stopped bothering to recover after every grand battle fought with exoskeletons and flight suits. At some point Manhattan had reached a critical mass where cleaning up would be almost self-defeating — it would drive away the tourists picking through the rubble for relics.

The job was in Times Square. Beck meant to resist passing Stark Tower. A combination of morbid curiosity and masochism drew him there anyway. In the early days it had been lousy with gawkers and vigil-holders. Most had left only their flowers and candles, but a few death truthers were still working the corner. One pressed a quarter-sheet into Beck’s hand before he could turn away. Its cheap metallic lettering twinkled in the fading light:

> _Tony Stark’s Cave: DECODED_
> 
> _The mainstream media has pandered to an ANTI-HERO agenda for months, yet curious minds remain willing to entertain the truth: the cave is real. The destroyer of Thanos and savior of the sleepers is ALIVE…_

Beck crumpled the paper and stuffed it in his pocket. That was what money bought you: a public that believed you were literally too smart to die.

It made the neon marquee on the corner of 43rd – _REST IN POWERS: AMERICA’S HEROES AND VILLAINS IN 4D AI HYPERREALITY_ – look almost tasteful.

The text was bright. Its background was yellowed with age and paisleyed with lines that suggested a string of other names, removed and re-bolted until they’d reached their current arrangement. The door protested as Beck pulled it open, and the stained carpet inside suggested that hyperreality was a less than lucrative pursuit. It was a strange place to find Stark tech, but exactly the sort of place that would hire a cheap unlicensed technician to fix it. Whatever it was —

Beck stopped. A woman in a neat bob and a catsuit was posing at the center of the lobby; one or another of Stark’s dead crew. (Her name was Natasha Romanoff, _Black Widow_, who was he trying to fool?) But what mattered was that her skin had flickered for a moment, and beneath it he’d caught the spin of a drone rotor and the dull metal of a hologram projector plate. He recognized that plate. He’d built it.

“You Quentin Beck?”

The man was a head shorter than him and gave the impression of being damp with sweat even in the air-conditioned room.

“Yeah.”

“Work with Stark tech?”

Beck’s heartbeat quickened. “Is that what this is?” he asked casually. When the man said yes, Beck could set him straight, knock a few degrees off Tony Stark's halo...

“Yeah. Got it at discount. It's a fucking disaster.”

Beck's words died in his throat. “Really?” he said instead. “Could you... elaborate?”

The man — there’d been no name on the netmail, and he didn’t seem interested in giving one now — laughed. “Where should I start? Judder. Battery life. That fucking flicker.”

Romanoff cycled through a canned animation, flicking her holographic curls with a thumb and forefinger. Beck slipped a hand through her shoulder and watched the drones' projected lights play across his skin, his breath catching at the familiar vibration of their rotors. He'd thought Stark might have scrapped them, but selling them here was somehow worse.

“They've probably never been calibrated correctly. And cleaning the lenses wouldn't hurt,” he said.

“That's not the point. People think it looks cheap. Like bad special effects.” The man batted at the image in exaggerated annoyance until Romanoff's features dissolved into a voxel blur. “I shoulda tried a wax show.”

“They say that?”

“That I shoulda tried – ”

“That it looks _cheap_.”

“Yeah. Even the kids see through it. I put a Thanos in the back room, and they don't even think it's scary – ”

“Do you think _anything_ could be scary to _anyone_ in this place?” Beck stretched his fingers until a rotor struck them and bounced. The illusion distorted and reassembled itself, and he looked past it to the shabby ticket desk and dingy panel lights. “Except maybe a health inspector.”

“I don't know what you're – ”

“At the end of the day, Thanos was a roided-up meathead who took some freshman economics classes and got scared of global warming. You could put a goddamn clone of him in here and he'd just look like a big purple-haired idiot. What made him _scary_ was the speeches. The threats. The showmanship.” _And the sleepers_ — but that would have seemed tasteless even here.

The man rolled his eyes. “Did I say I wanted to hire a theater critic?”

“I'm just telling you, the problem isn't the system. You have to show people something they want to believe in.”

“Can you fix these stupid things or not?”

“They're not – ” A rotor danced across the edge of Beck's fingernail, and he stopped. He knew where this went. He said something vicious and satisfying and he lost some money and he went back to his apartment to seethe out another night, counting down the sleepless hours to another day of under-the-table repair jobs and helpless rage – his own animation loop, playing on repeat since that last day at Stark Industries. “How much would you take for them?”

“To buy them? All of them?”

“Sure. You could spend the money on wax. Or get out of the city. I don't know.” He was rambling now, trying not to betray an excitement he'd barely been aware of. “How much?”

The man looked him over as closely as the bartender, but this time Beck felt the focus on his cracked shoes, his faded shirt.

“I'm pretty sure it's more than you've got.”

It was pointless to insult someone who was so incontrovertibly right. He wouldn't have known what to do with them anyway – they'd just sit on a shelf or in a box, reminding him of the past.

“I was just curious,” he said quickly. “Get me the control tablet and I'll start the calibration.”

The man disappeared behind a garishly painted door. Beck kept his eyes on the projection, cataloging the passing seams and lesions on its skin. There were so many improvements he could have made if Stark hadn't pulled him off it, if Stark hadn't rolled the whole project into some petty therapy visualizer and abandoned it. What had he said in the netmail? _The world has real problems. It needs real solutions. We'll have time for parlor tricks later._

Stark's entire world (_the hero-industrial complex_, somebody in the ex-Stark group chat had called it) was built on solving sexy problems with flashy tech and clever acronyms.

He could have at least fixed the cell networks.


	2. Neighborhood Threat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"We can take a normal guy who's good at tactics and good at brawling and make him something more. Get him a jetsuit or an exo or some good story licensing deals. But we have to know how he's going to use them, who he's going to fight for. We have to know who he _is_."_

The trains were delayed as usual, but at least they were running. And at least Beck no longer reflexively checked his pocket for a phone to find the status. He was lucky they’d salvaged the net at all after the Ultron virus. The device lockdown had gotten them back onto the global internet, but wireless was still too risky. It’d only take one hijacked connection to crash the whole thing again.

Ultron’s source remained officially a mystery. Back at Stark Industries there’d been rumors about a global AI peacekeeping project, although those had never amounted to more than conspiratorial whispers. If they were true… well, just one more thing to hate the man for.

The express train rattled into Times Square station with a gust of cool air and a screech. It was sparklingly clean — nobody was going to get their arm broken for a graffiti tag. But it was nearly empty. The foreign millionaires who owned New York now never came down here; they were busy buying up towers to redevelop after _the whole hero thing_ calmed down. Maybe they were playing a very long game. Or maybe they just didn’t understand America.

Stark hadn’t single-handedly started the hero boom, of course. Half his work was based on old Pentagon experiments, and he’d never touched weaponized prosthetics. The government could have stepped in and outlawed hero-tech, like most of the world had done after Stark’s jaunt into Afghanistan. But he’d been the one to give hyper-powered vigilantism a brand.

And although Beck would never admit it out loud... of course he’d idolized the man, just like every other engineering undergraduate in the country. Had he actually bought that old graphic shirt — Iron Man, laser beams, “Tony Stark blinded me with science”? God, that would be embarrassing.

In fairness, Stark probably hadn’t known he was about to launch an arms race. But dysfunctional old-money families like the Odinsons had taken their succession fights into the streets, and corporate opportunists like Chitauri had jumped in, and the robocops had joined the fray to keep order. And when Stark tried to deescalate he’d only started the Accords, a civil war between factions so baroque that it took a chart to keep them straight. And then to top it all, Thanos — and the dust.

As the train reached the bridge and Beck stood watching Manhattan’s cracked skyline recede, he wasn’t quite ready to be fair.

The door clanged at the end of the empty car. Robocops. Perfect.

There were three of them, functionally identical inside their shock-absorbent bodysuits. Like dolls with swappable flesh eyeplates: two ruddy-faced men and what looked like a pale teenager. They plodded closer, exoskeletal joints compensating for the rock of the train. Beck carefully averted his eyes and waited for them to pass.

“Hey there, sir. Everything all right?”

Beck glanced up and nodded absently, wishing he had a phone to look distracted with. The teenager hesitated and cleared his throat. “Sir, we’d like to check your bag.”

“Why?”

“Um… we’ve gotten…” he glanced back at one of the older men and continued, authoritative. “Sir, we’ve gotten reports of suspicious packages at Times Square. It’s just a precaution. We don’t want another case of dust on our hands.”

Beck ran a mental inventory. The old Stark debug tools probably counted as stolen. But the odds of them noticing seemed low. The potential tradeoffs…

He stopped and clenched a fist. He wasn’t going to follow orders from this tripartite manchild-thing drunk on power, patrolling the city on a slow night.

“Come back with a real cop,” he muttered.

It was a delay at best. Half the Blue Lives Union vigilantes were real cops, and they barely bothered to deny it. But damned if he was doing through this charade tonight.

“I hope we don’t need to do that, sir. It’s urgent.”

“Thanos is gone, you idiot. Dust is curable. You can wait one fucking stop for the police if you’re that scared of me.”

Something in their collective postures shifted, defensive. One of the older ones broke formation and flanked him. “We can escort you to a station, if you’d feel better about that.”

“Is this seriously the best you’ve got? Shaking down normal people just trying to get home?” The restraint Beck had mustered in Times Square was evaporating. “Jesus fucking Christ, go do something useful with your life. Nobody needs another hero here.”

The teenager’s suit rippled, contracting for action. That had been a mistake.

“Of course we do,” he said. “The old ones are dead.”

Beck could hear the other robocop’s exojoints click behind him. “Unless you think that’s good,” the man spat in his ear.

What was it G had said to him once? _Fascism is just the natural immune response to ingesting power._ But there were good reasons he’d stopped listening to her.

“Sir, it’s just a —”

“It is not just a precaution!” Beck yanked the bag away. “If you want to play hero, go for it. But don’t ask normal people to indulge your —”

He stopped as a fist cracked against his face.

The dizziness came first, as if his brain needed a moment to reassemble itself before the pain drove everything out of it. The world blinked out and faded in, and when he could see again he realized that he was somehow still standing, his fingers clenched around the cold metal of the subway pole.

The teenager hit him again, with the added force of the bodysuit, and Beck's teeth slashed blood from his lip. He stumbled, but the man behind him kept him upright, twisting his arm against his back. Beck understood instinctively that he should go limp and drop the bag, let them search the thing and feel like they’d won. They wouldn’t even take his wallet, he wasn’t being _mugged_ — he might have laughed at that if the next blow hadn't landed in his ribs and nearly doubled him over. The boy paused, and the solution was so simple, all he had to do was let go...

“You passed!” he gasped instead. “Congratulations, you all... passed.”

They froze. Finally, the teenager dropped his fist and spoke.

“Passed what?”

Beck tried to catch his breath. His skull felt too large for his skin, and they hadn’t even finished crossing the bridge.

“Community patrol... spot check,” he said. He was having trouble focusing long enough to string the words together. “Um… Avengers Auxiliary Initiative.”

“You’re from…”

“From the… the undercover team.” He gave what he hoped was a genial smile, trying not to wince at the metal fingers still gripped around his forearm. “And you all followed… like, followed procedure. Just like we hoped.”

It was such an obvious lie, they’d probably arrest him or something equally ridiculous for telling it —

“Wait — does that mean you’ve been waiting for us?” The man released his arm. “Like, we’re on your radar?”

That wasn’t the tone of a wannabe cop — it was the voice of an excited kid who wanted an autograph. Beck gripped the subway pole and stood a few inches straighter.

“Of course.” This was stupid. So _extraordinarily_ stupid. And somehow it was working. “You’re one of our… our top squads.”

The teenager stepped back. “Whoa, I mean, I wouldn’t have… Look, I’m sorry for…”

“No problem. Part of... the job.” The smile felt a little more convincing this time, and the light of the station was glowing ahead. “Hey just do me... a favor, okay? Get off at the next stop and catch a different train.”

“Wait, why?” asked the man behind him.

_No idea._

“Come on, don’t be stupid,” said the teenager. “We shouldn't blow his cover.”

It was increasingly hard to tell which one was talking. The train shuddered to a halt, and Beck kept a white-knuckled hold on the pole as the doors opened and they stepped outside. One of them waved goodbye. Beck managed to return it before he collapsed onto a seat.

***

The damage probably wasn't as bad as it seemed, Beck thought as he walked the final blocks to his apartment. The side of his face was smooth and swollen, and blood was still seeping onto his tongue. But the pain had been drowned out by something almost euphoric. If it wasn’t just a concussion, then this must be what power felt like. What admiration felt like…

Not admiration for Beck, though. All he’d done was namedrop Stark’s team.

_You never wanted to be a hero? Not even once?_

It hadn’t been a lie. He’d only wanted to find some space that wasn’t run by them, where he could do his work and get some respect for it. He thought wistfully of Romanoff back at Times Square — how real she could have looked if Stark had just given him a chance.

The hologram had looked a little better after the calibration, though probably not good enough to keep that place in business. A real overhaul would take money to swap the batteries and lenses, time to rework the firmware… even if Beck had gotten the drones for free, he’d never manage it. He wasn’t even sure where he’d keep them.

His building would have been called prewar a decade ago, before that term simply applied to anything older than the Accords. It must have been lovely once, but now its dull bricks were crumbling, its stairs had chipped, and the front door was jammed as usual and wedged open with a chunk of cinderblock.

When Beck moved in it had felt like voluntary slumming: _look what you've reduced me to_. Within a few years, even living there alone had become too luxurious. His latest roommate was a college student that he saw twice a week at most, usually with a girlfriend just flirtatious enough to remind Beck that he hadn’t dated anybody seriously since G.

The apartment was empty when he turned on the lights, except for a shadow that scurried into a radiator gap, skirting the trap he’d set that morning. Yes, he’d need somewhere bigger if he wanted to test the holograms’ limits. Like a warehouse, Beck thought, dabbing blood from his gouged lip with a ragged towel.

He wouldn’t project the damn Avengers, either. Whatever he settled on, he could probably handle the basic model design and animation, outsource the finicky stuff to freelancers. He’d compose scenes that would always turn out the right way, never end up with the wrong person dead or fired or alone.

But none of that was going to happen. Because those were all things that money bought you, Beck reminded himself, hitting the power button on his nettop. He couldn’t start looking up parts and design agencies for hardware he didn’t even own, paid for with funds he’d never have.

_Tell your story. Start a community fund._

He didn’t have a story that any backer would listen to. And he’d have to build a following. Convince people to care about him. Learn to maintain a conversation sober for more than ten minutes instead of retreating before anybody could realize how much of a failure he’d become.

Those were the options for hero tech, weren’t they? Get rich, get famous, volunteer for some insane lab experiment, or...

Beck checked the contacts on his nettop. She was still there, down at the bottom: Vicky Snow. Active.

He was about to do something incredibly stupid.

***

Beck left the videophone camera off to hide both his rising bruises and his apartment’s squalor. He waited, watching the icon pulse for what felt like minutes, until she answered. Snow killed the camera to follow his lead, leaving just enough time for Beck to catch a glimpse of satin blouse and a sleek modernist lamp.

“Quentin? Wow. It’s been a while.”

He could almost hear a forced smile, and he didn’t blame her. They’d joined the informal “Fired by Stark” group chat around the same time — Beck from engineering, Snow from accounting. They’d dropped out at the same time, too — Beck because he’d gotten sick of being pitied, and Snow because she’d gotten a new job.

“Sounds like you’ve been doing… doing good,” he said. “I heard you closed Moon Knight.” He hadn’t exactly, but he’d skimmed some of her firm’s press releases. Hero venture capital. Getting fired might have actually been an asset there — people in the business would know how goddamn volatile Stark was.

“Yeah,” Snow said. “Fascinating guy, even if the multiple-personality thing’s a little weird. Looks like a brick wall wearing a Halloween costume designed by Rei Kawakubo.”

“Sounds great.” He nodded, despite the fact that she couldn’t see him, to pretend he had the faintest idea what she meant — he’d done a lot of that back in the chat.

There was still time to hang up and forget this whole plan. Go nurse the spikes of pain in his ribs and sterilize his lip with bourbon.

“Actually, I… Vicky, I need a favor,” he said. “I need you to take me on.”

Snow made a brief, noncommittal hum in her throat. “What are you talking about?”

“I need investment. I’ve got a — a thing planned out. A hero thing. Or at least, you know…” He struggled for anything that wouldn’t sound vague or pretentious and gave up. “It’s hero-adjacent.”

“If you’re trying to manage some new talent, they can just get in touch through the office —”

“It’s me,” he said.

Snow laughed and quickly stifled it. “Wait. You’re going hero? What’s your deal?”

“I’m still filling out the details.”

“Then come back later.”

“I need money right now if I’m gonna do it at all,” he said. “And it’s way more than I’ve got.”

“We can’t sign a blank check.”

Her voice had taken on a rote, professional gloss — he wasn’t a friend anymore, just somebody who’d triggered a rejection script. Beck’s anger flared again.

“Right. You’d rather have Moon Knight. A guy whose gimmick is literally schizophrenia.”

The nettop speakers crackled as Snow sighed. “See… this is the problem,” she said. “You don’t understand heroes. You don't understand why people love them.”

He started to protest, but she continued. “Look, Quentin. We can take a normal guy who's good at tactics and good at brawling and make him something more. Get him a jetsuit or an exo or some good story licensing deals. But we have to know how he's going to use them, who he's going to fight for. We have to know who he _is_.”

Beck played his last card. “It's about Tony Stark.”

“Stark?” The speakers crackled again — this time at a sharp intake of breath. “How?”

Her voice was real now. He’d broken through the gloss.

“I want to buy some hologram tech I was building at Stark Industries,” Beck said. “I want to build a hero with it. Make the monsters he’s going to fight. Forget finding talent, Vicky — we’re going to make the next Iron Man. And we’re going to make him better than Stark ever was.”

Dead silence.

He could handle this. If she said no, he would ice his face and fall asleep and pretend he'd never had the idea. Spend another year sharing an apartment with mice and roaches and bored kids with bright futures, promising himself that the next year would be better. Just like the year before, and the year before that.

Finally, Snow spoke. “I still can’t sign you,” she said. “But I could get you a little money under the table. I think you might be able to do this.”

Beck tried and failed to keep his voice steady. “Really? That's – ”

“I was serious, though – you need a plan, and you’re not the right person to work it out,” she said.

“If you’re talking about some agency PR flack—”

“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”

She was right, and Beck could tell that she knew it. “Come on. I can’t call Guterman,” he said. “I don’t remember the last time I talked to her.”

“Hm. Then you’ll have to ask somebody else for money.” Snow clicked her tongue. “I need to go, Quentin. But call me, will you? If you decide to take the jump.”

She cut the connection, and Beck’s screen went dark.

He had new plans for tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I should be clear that this is not exactly a *realistic* version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's just a version where nobody's magic, nothing is cool, and everyone is miserable. Call it the GrimCU.  
\- Yes, Mysterio is a lonely loser who also looks like Jake Gyllenhaal. We'll get through this together.  
\- Turns out Rei Kawakubo actually hates heroes. Vivienne Westwood is a big fan, though.
> 
> Up next: Building an interdimensional warrior for fun and profit.


	3. The Right Profile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Some guy turns up with power tech, claiming he's from 'Earth-849' or some bullshit: that's you. A few people buy it on the spot. And most people figure you're completely nuts. But it's the rest – the undecided – who really sell it. They’ll drive themselves crazy over you. Because you can be whatever they want you to be."_

Beck had met Guterman through group chat in the worst depths of his post-Stark self-loathing. She’d been fired from the PR department while he was still an intern, and she’d held the group together by dropping obsessive Stark and hero documentation into chat. It had been months before he’d met her in person, when she’d invited a few of them to shelter in place with her during a bad Odinson family dust-up, and he’d been the only one to take her up.

He’d nearly left when he saw her house on the outskirts of Brooklyn, but something about her had drawn him in: a kind of utter confidence in the wreck that had become her life. Her work was mysterious and itinerant, her home a gift from a dead relative, she’d said — the only kind she had. Guterman had carved a space for herself in New York, and she had folded him into it during his darkest moments, sharing cheap beer and warmed-over bodega sandwiches while they waited for a ceasefire. When the Odinson board announced an amicable split, they’d watched the conference on videotube from her four-poster bed.

She’d never given her full name in chat, and he’d assumed it was something embarrassing. But when he asked about it, an arm around her soft shoulders, she’d grinned. _Not at all. I love it_, she’d told him. _I want to keep it for myself_.

_I can’t call you ‘Guterman’ now_, he’d protested. _It sounds ridiculous_.

She laughed and ran a dark fingernail around the edge of his eye, tracing its zygomatic arch. _Just call me G_.

Nine months later he’d broken up with her, and three months after that he’d broken up with her again, and a few days after that a deranged eco-terrorist who called himself Thanos had coordinated the release of a designer neurotoxin across every major metropolitan area in the United States. Beck had lurked in the chat feed for hours, waiting for G to drop something — any conspiratorial article or gallows quip that would confirm she hadn’t been one of the million-and-counting comatose victims being shipped to vent farms outside the city. Finally, her icon had popped online and her name came up:

_Well, fuck. My bodega guy got dusted._

Then he’d closed the client, blocked her videophone ID, and spent the rest of the day staring at the cracked plaster on his ceiling, pretending that nothing outside its dirty white expanse existed. When he reopened the chat window a week later, she was gone.

It took an hour for the bus to reach G’s house that morning, and it took Beck ten minutes to work up the courage to knock. Maybe she’d sold the place. Maybe she’d found a real job. Maybe this had been a terrible idea from the start —

“Holy shit,” G asked, opening the door. “What happened to you?”

Beck recognized everything about her instantly: the lank blond hair, the chewed-up vape pen, the frilly thrift-shop button-down with one sleeve frayed open. He tried to grin and thought better of it before his lip split again. 

“Hero beat me up.”

“Fine, don't tell me.” She took a drag on the pen and set her face in a smile that looked slightly threatening. “What are you doing here, Quentin?”

“I didn't know how else to find you.”

“Not my question.”

“I need to ask you a favor.” He glanced down the empty street, suddenly and irrationally afraid of someone hearing him. “And I need to do it inside.”

The house was as funereal as Beck remembered – windows masked with blackout curtains, walls stacked with yellowing books and papers. The kind of thing that was passed from generation to generation and fell apart a little more with each use. G offered him a familiar can of Tecate, and when he declined she added a dessicated lime slice and a teaspoon of hot sauce and swirled the beer gently as they sat. She was still swirling it when he finished his pitch, but at least she'd stopped smiling.

“Damn. That's... actually not bad,” she said.

Beck nearly laughed in relief.

“Complicated, yeah,” she said. “Hard to pull off. But if you did it... Jesus Christ. That shit is the whole fucking zeitgeist.”

“Is that good?”

“Our gods are dead. People are sick of reality. They need somebody who will give them exactly what they want. A happy ending, every time. And that... is the power you're describing. Not flight, not strength, not lasers. Narrative.” G paused and took a long drink of her beer. “You weren't making that up, about the hero – were you?” she said. “You're here because somebody made you feel helpless. Again.”

“That's oversimplifying.”

“Why _are_ you really doing this, Quentin? Is it revenge? Glory? Are you trying to prove a point? Or do you just want to know if you can get away with it?”

Beck shrugged. “I'll figure it out later.”

“You'd better figure it out soon. Because if we're going to sell a lie, I need to understand the truth.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Why are you going to help me?”

G closed her eyes in thought, and for a moment Beck caught the odd angle that gave her a strange, sophisticated beauty. Then she opened them again and grinned, showing yellowing teeth behind chapped lips.

“Chalk me up as an accelerationist.”

***

G’s netbook looked new, but it was already smudged with fingerprints and cracked along one side. She sat cross-legged in an easy chair and balanced it on her legs, typing her first notes in merciless staccato.

“So we start with the basics,” she said, mumbling around the vape pen. “You have powers, really good stuff, top-tier spread. How did you get them?”

Beck thought about asking to open a window, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what had taken residence between the curtains and the light. He sat across from her in a distressed chintz sofa.

“I’m going to have the investment —”

G cut him off. “Not on the books, you aren’t,” she said. “Think weirder.”

“Like… Corporate R&D?”

Her typing stalled. The silence sounded accusatory. “Which corporation? Somebody’d probably sue you for patent infringement.”

“Mad scientist.”

“On its own? Boring. Vague.”

“Military experiment _by_ a mad scientist.”

“Potentially.” She started typing again, and he relaxed. “By the way. How do you account for the real Stark Industries guy with your face and DNA?”

“Dammit, I don’t know.” He’d vaguely assumed Stark had thrown away every trace of him — but G was right. “Twin? Clone? Mirror universe doppelganger?”

G took her fingers off the netbook, and she pulled the pen from her mouth, resting it precariously on the keyboard. “Not a mirror universe,” she said. “You're from a multiverse.”

Beck sighed. “I'm doing my best here. You don't have to mock me.”

She shook her head so vigorously that her vape pen tumbled to the floor. She ignored it. “I promise. One hundred percent. It’s perfect.”

“I don’t even know how that would work,” he said. “Nobody would even start to buy it.”

“Oh yeah, most people will think it's ridiculous. That's _why_ it's perfect.”

Beck picked up the pen; knowing G, she'd let it singe a hole in the floor. “I don't understand,” he said.

“So.” G flexed her fingers and tented them beneath her chin. “Some guy turns up with power tech, claiming he's from 'Earth-849' or some bullshit: that's you,” she said. “A few people buy it on the spot – no, I swear, they will. And most people figure either you're completely nuts, or you're so far down a performance art rabbit hole that like, same difference.”

She was right, it was ridiculous. But for the first time, Beck could see the shape of a plan. He leaned back and let her continue, fixing its outline in his mind.

“But it's the rest – the _undecided_ – who really sell it. They’ll drive themselves crazy over you,” said G. “Why? Because you can be whatever they want you to be. Vape, please.”

He handed her the pen. She shook it until a light on the side blinked on, fitted it between her teeth, and struck up typing again.

“G, what is it you actually do?” he asked, looking around her darkened house.

“I don't think that's relevant,” G said. Then she smiled, and this time it looked almost warm. “Because from now on? I work for you.”

***

> _Planning Document: Version 1.0._
> 
> _Executive Summary:_
> 
> _There are other worlds than this, and Earth-849 is fundamentally similar to — yet crucially different from — our own. [Things to be charmingly surprised by: competitive first-person shooters, the hero-romance comics genre, pizza. See Appendix D.] The Quentin Beck of Earth-849, likewise, is both strange and familiar. _
> 
> _Yet as our governments and megacorps spawned heroic technology, so Earth-849's spawned monsters: the Elementals, a quartet of artificial intelligences in power armor transformed into ravening horsemen of death by horrific experiments plumbing the unholy depths of interdimensional travel. [Appendix B]_
> 
> _The rich and powerful opened a door to another world... whereby ensuring the obliteration of their own. [Is this overselling it? Maybe stick to a few dead countries and a global quality-of-life reduction?] You – part of an elite squadron of soldiers imbued with whatever powers we can get working by Saturday – are one of the few people capable of stopping it._
> 
> _Your life has been measured in small victories and crushing defeats, your friends and lovers [Appendix E] long shrouded by the fog of war. In a last-ditch attempt to save the world, your squadron fragments the Elementals across the multiverse, diluting their insurmountable powers. But it requires a supreme sacrifice: each of you must follow and fight their weaker incarnations on a different Earth. You are a man cast adrift on the waves of space and time, reliant on designer drugs to survive in a hostile universe, undertaking a lonely mission to undo the hubris of your own reality – _

“I think you're having too much fun with this,” Beck said, rubbing sweat from his face and handing the netbook back to G.

G adjusted the factory office’s desk fan and wiped back a sodden lock of hair. “Trust me, nobody is having fun here.”

She returned to typing, and Beck wandered out of the office, sweltering in the soupy Florida air. The rest of the crew was on the factory floor – _they made energy glove components here, until a machine took a guy’s arm off and they outsourced the whole thing to Bangladesh_, G had told him earlier, because that was naturally the sort of thing she knew.

Now the place was empty except for their new recruits Jan Lincoln and Bill Riva, names that had been nothing but a label beside a chat status indicator until six weeks ago.

Riva had come from one of the inscrutable engineering divisions Stark Industries established to build whatever half-baked tech the man thought up while punching out terrorists or rival CEOs, then dissolved just as quickly when he tired of it. Stark technically hadn’t even fired him — his supervisor had thrown him out for not living up to the unmatchable _specter_ of their CEO. He’d taken about four hours off work to sleep every night since Beck had recruited him, maybe less if Beck accidentally brought up Stark’s name.

Lincoln had worked on industrial design, and G was adamant that she shouldn’t be here at all — called her too ideological, too idealistic, too _annoyingly fucking Anglo_. She’d been the best Beck could find, though, and she’d been running out the last days of a work visa when he tracked her down. Beck had gotten her married to Riva about a month ago. He couldn’t figure out if the two had started dating. In any case, even G had no complaints about the suits.

“You quite sure we want to do this in high summer?” Lincoln asked when she saw him. “Bit of a stress test. Mostly for you.”

The first suit was long done — a lightweight shell printed with fiduciary markers. The second occupied Lincoln’s mannequin. Beck ran his fingers over its breastplate’s ridged metal and the dense fabric of its cape. Lincoln refused to explain her influences – _Well it was built in another world, and Earth-849-you wouldn't have much time for fashion history, would he?_ But the mood was clear enough. It was martial but not utilitarian, classical where the Iron Man suit had been sci-fi... god, was he still comparing everything he did to Stark?

It also weighed as much as a small child, and even with Lincoln's rudimentary cooling system there was an iron-maiden quality to it. The first time he'd worn it he'd barely gotten across the warehouse.

“It's supposed to be a stress test,” Beck told her. “And I'm... I'm stronger now.” He felt silly saying it, but after weeks of inexpert weight training and net combat videos, how could he not be?

“Then I'll get on with it, I suppose. Have you and Bill fixed the cape physics yet?”

“The canned animations are fine. We're dealing with the transitional sections. It keeps clipping through the lasers...”

Riva called the drones into action, and Beck realized he'd trailed off, still perpetually transfixed by their illusions. They rose into the air and shimmered, and in their place a creature slouched toward being: a swirl of cumulus haze around the hard iron of a metal-clad wight, its empty eyes ringed in cirrus foam. [Wind Elemental, Codename “Cyclone.” Appendix B, Section 1.] Then, in half-scale and vivid color – there he was.

Not him, Beck reminded himself. The other Quentin Beck, tragic defender of the multiverse, with Lincoln's suit and a mirrored fishbowl for a head. Lincoln's voice: _That's what you are, isn't it? A reflection. Of what people want to see. _And though Beck found simulating its reflections deeply irritating, he'd agreed.

The figure swung a neat parabola around the creature, fixed it with a blast of bright green light. The elemental recoiled and thrashed one wispy arm, and Riva's ultrasonic ballistics kicked into operation, scattering a clumsy stack of cinderblocks as Beck's avatar smashed through them. Somewhere inside the cloaked drones would be humming in unison, coordinating their attacks and their projections against the warehouse's spatial map. Three more days, a larger scale – and showtime.

G had found the venue. It was called the Crystal Palace, an aging and half-shuttered mall that had been bleeding out financially even before the Accords. It probably didn’t help that zoning officials had sanctioned a Superfund-worthy chemical landfill some half-dozen miles away.

All of which made it perfect for Beck's purposes: a semi-populated space with plenty of walls to knock down and props to toss around, next to a toxic swamp that added a frisson of danger to the fight. And so far from the hero hotspots that no one else was likely to show up. His crew had spent weeks collecting a spatial mesh of the Palace and animating the battle around it.

It was a jury-rigged system — if he’d had time, he’d have created something adaptable, something he didn’t have to constantly direct. But they’d barely pulled this together as it was, and the plan was simple. They'd show up when the doors opened Saturday morning. Riva and Lincoln would run drone calibration while Beck would wait in one of the deserted alcoves, camouflaged in his fid suit. His little mechanical army would rise up around him, and it would nestle him in the heart of its violent maelstrom, building its grand fight – 

He needed to stop reading G's dossiers.

Beck was going to stand in the middle of a swarm of drones animating a giant fight between a man in a fishbowl helmet and an anthropomorphized extreme weather phenomenon. When the man won Beck would scramble into a 23rd-century Roman legionary costume and take his place. And somewhere along the line G would call the local TV station and make sure they caught some of the fight on video. Then the crew would regroup and read the net commentary and make their next move.

Easy enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Generally a bad idea to base your trademark costume around on-the-nose symbolism.  
\- The entire character of Guterman is the result of crossing "what kind of person comes up with an insane multiverse story" with "what kind of person doesn't have a first name."
> 
> Up Next: Meet Maria Hill. She's from the government, and she's here to help.


	4. Death in the Suburbs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"It’s called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. If they’ve got it on your Earth, you might know it as SHIELD.”_

The problems started when they got through the door. Not with his drones – his drones were fine, his drones were _perfect_. It was the rest of the universe that had conspired yet again to fuck him over, this time in the form of a hard barricade and a CONDEMNED placard across the south wing of the Palace.

“Why wasn't this on the maps?” Beck was trying to keep the panic out of his question. Half the fight was choreographed for the hall behind it.

“It wasn't there,” said Riva, sounding exactly as jumpy as Beck felt – it was vicariously satisfying now, probably dangerous soon. “I swear it _wasn't there_ – ”

“So we work around it.” G had donned a flimsy health-goth jumpsuit and a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses, a look so out-of-character that Beck kept forgetting it was her. She took a drag on her vape and smiled. “We improvise.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Riva asked. “Would you ask an animator to _improvise_ a Disney film?”

G raised her eyebrows. “I mean if they weren't gonna get murdered by copyright lawyers, yeah, probably.”

“You're...” Beck weighed the respective danger of pissing off G or giving Riva a heart attack. “You're both right. We can't run the whole choreography. But we can set new coordinates and splice some of the sections together. Just get me a netbook and a sync cable and I'll run a new routine to the control pad.”

“What coordinates?” Riva's voice was still brittle, but it no longer had the pitch of rising hysteria.

“I don't know. The Annex?”

Lincoln was yanking a drone case down the last of the stairs from the barricade. “Too many people still minding shops up there,” she said.

“So we give them the day off and a few bruises. At worst,” said G.

Lincoln slammed the case on the last steps a little harder than necessary. “Don't be – a _twat_ – to service workers.”

“Fine. Somewhere else,” said Beck quickly.

“Why don't we just come back?” asked Riva.

Beck hesitated, considering his response. G made the call for him.

“Because we're running out of money,” she said.

He caught her eye, and she shrugged almost apologetically. It was true. Another week and they'd lose the warehouse lease, a few days after that and Snow's money was gone. They needed a win – it meant publicity and donations and maybe even sponsorship, if the sponsor was willing to deal with either an interdimensional traveler or an obvious lunatic.

“We're gonna do it today, and it's gonna be fine,” he said. “Come on. If Stark could do this, so can we.”

Beck wasn't sure what _this_ referred to or whether Stark could, in fact, have done it. But that wasn't the point. He'd reminded them of what really mattered: their boundless, malignant collective loathing.

“Now seriously, please – somebody find me a cable.”

***

The elemental burst through the ceiling of the Crystal Palace at 10:33 AM. Its momentum sent glass raining onto the mosaic tile below, and its great hollow eyes gazed into the neon window of a franchised tattoo parlor. The artist dropped her needle and ran.

At 10:34, the elemental howled the lament of a damned creature. [Mixed by freelancers, a blend of coyote chorus and insect drone and the eternally dependable Wilhelm Scream.] At 10:35, it swiped a jewelry kiosk and blasted it into rubble, and no one was close enough to see the mismatched angle at the moment of impact. At 10:36 it began its rampage in earnest, advancing down the northern arcade toward the sparkling atrium.

At 10:37, the avatar appeared.

It floated from the sky (two drones, pushing the edge of the mesh network's range) and slammed forty feet straight down onto the tile (enhance model resolution, deploy hard sonic blast). The elemental turned its gaze just in time for the avatar to stagger it with a beam of green light.

Beck's earpiece crackled. “I called the local networks. And some guy in a candle store called 911,” said G. “We're on.”

“Any spectators headed this way?”

“A few,” said G. “With cameras.”

“What about the police scanner?”

“Normal dispatch.”

No robocop calls, then. Maybe nobody who’d intervene at all. Thank god.

10:39, and the elemental knocked his avatar into a bed of artificial plants. The avatar sprung to its feet (ridiculous animation, what had he been thinking) and whirled to face it, cape whipping around its back. Heroically.

10:40, another laser blast. The elemental roared and launched itself into a loop around the atrium. (Hold... hold...) It reached the space above the south wing barricade. Beck hit the controls, and the drones slammed a blast into it at full power. He stumbled through the rubble.

10:41. G sprinted into the atrium, a few flustered mallwalkers trailing her. He called the avatar down to the barricade.

“Keep them away for a second!” Beck tried not to cough with a lungful of dust. “I'm gonna get us back on track.”

He swiped the control pad, and the scene flickered out. The drones' audio cut, unmasking the nearly silent hum of their rotors as they swarmed past him. He was exposed now. If G hadn't kept the crowd back, they'd clock their hero as a man in a crazy-patterned monochrome suit – but only for a second, until he disappeared into the south wing.

10:44, and the drones reassembled fifty feet down the arcade. Their projections all but glowed in the dim hall.

“I've got two cameras on the entrance, plus mine.” It was G again. “Get closer. And like... smash something, you know?”

10:45. G was past the barricade, and one of the mallwalkers had worked up the courage to follow her with a raised tablet. No TV film crews yet. But two solid recording angles.

10:46. Smash something.

The windows of an empty shop imploded, scattering fragments of glass and brown paper like confetti. Fine. Not photogenic. Try again.

The elemental soared upward. It hovered at the grand pillars of the crystal skylight, waiting for the avatar to follow. Like a dance. [Like timestamp 04:33 on videotube entry “Dance Compilation Understated Moves Part 4.”]

And at 10:47, the avatar first spoke with Beck's voice.

“Stay back!”

Clear, loud, but just a note of selfless fear [Precanned Concern Exclamation #5]. The avatar raised its fists for another laser barrage. The elemental was faster. It thrashed an ill-formed limb – against not the avatar, but the pillar beside it.

At first Beck didn’t register the problem. He saw the judder as the drones’ rotors slammed into overdrive — he’d have to fix that later — and admired the neat hole it had punched in the pillar. Then the ceiling buckled, the gap closed, and he realized what he’d done.

“Stay back!” his avatar shouted again, but it was drowned out by a hundred panes of glass shattering above him. A fist-sized chunk of granite struck his back, and he nearly dropped the controller — more in surprise than pain. Some part of him had forgotten that this wasn’t all fake, under his control. The Crystal Palace had given him a curtain call.

He flattened himself against a wall and sheltered the tablet with his hand. A cloud of dust had blocked his view of the atrium, and he could barely hear his own voice.

“Is somebody filming?” he shouted to G.

“News showed up!”

It took a moment to decipher the words and another to find the right tablet button: VANQUISH. 

Cute joke.

Beck knew the avatar’s moves by heart, but he saw them only as flashes of kaleidoscope light. The glass had thrown the holograms off-kilter, and he could only hope that they still held together from a distance. A drone hit the tile with a crunch, one rotor neatly sheared and spitting sparks. It was only a matter of time till the rest of them fell, unless he got them out. Only a few minutes of power left. But the fight had to be wrapping up, the elemental burning to ash and his avatar fading while his cloaking turned off and revealed —

Wait. He had to be wearing the armor.

He dropped his bag and struggled out of the fiduciary suit, glass catching on his fingertips. G was yelling something into his headset. Beck ignored her. He’d practiced this, it was just a matter of knowing the clips…

“Get out! get the fuck out!” she was saying.

He could no longer hear the drones — hopefully they’d found their way upwards before their batteries ran dry. The dust kept him invisible as he pulled on the gauntlets and untangled the cape, goddammit _why_ had he wanted a cape?

“Please. Quentin,” said G. “This is not the thing you die over.”

He caught something like fear in her voice, decided he was mishearing anger. The suit was on, the gauntlets, that ridiculous helmet that tinted the world greenish-gray, and all he had to do was walk out and face the applause —

The chunk of cement caught Beck between the shoulder blades. The helmet slammed into his face as he went down, and he could think just enough to shut the bag and push it tight under the mounting debris before the world grayed out and time slowed.

Plan, revised edition: all he had to do was wait, just wait, and an opportunity would present itself to do something.

“That him?”

“Yeah! I’ve never seen anything like it…”

Beck didn’t recognize the voices — the first female, smooth contralto, the second male, stuttery and breathless. (G’s candle store guy?) He retracted the helmet, tried to stand, stumbled, and convinced himself that the exhaustion was only good acting. G’s voice had gone dead, but Beck muttered a time query into the headset:

10:58.

Not even thirty minutes and he’d done more than he had in the past four years.

“Thank you,” said the woman somewhere behind him. “We’ll take it from here.”

A pair of men in nondescript uniforms helped Beck to his feet. His back felt numb where he’d been hit, and the euphoric sensation of success had fogged his thinking. He barely realized they were leading him somewhere until he’d reached the end of the South Hall and the woman had opened a service door.

“Who… who are you?” Beck asked.

“My name’s Agent Maria Hill,” she said. “I’m... with the government.”

She wasn’t wearing anything powered, as far as Beck could tell, just a crisp and ordinary suit beneath an oddly familiar face. Maybe he’d seen her at Stark Industries for a contract. Or maybe she just had a good government agent’s chameleonism.

“What are you doing here?”

“Hold on. I need to bring the car around.”

They stepped outside, and Beck winced at the light. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, and one of the men twitched a few fingers against his blazer. Probably toward a gun — it would be mostly symbolic against a real hero’s exo-armor with its shock absorbers and predictive computing compensation, but it would cut right through Lincoln’s suit.

Did this mean they’d caught him? He thought back to the bag in the rubble. Its contents were more than enough to expose him, and his fingerprints all over it. As Hill pulled up in an unmarked black car, though, she smiled. “Come on,” she said. “Like I said, I’m from the government. And I’m here to help.”

***

“That was quite the _thing_ back there,” said Hill as they turned onto the freeway. “We don’t have anything like it on our threat profiles.”

Beck took a last look back at the Crystal Palace, one corner now jagged and deflated. “Good,” he said. “Then there’s still a chance to save your Earth.”

Hill raised her eyebrows. “Our Earth.”

“Yes.” His hands were stinging beneath the gauntlets. He pulled one off and caught the glint of glass in his bare fingers. He slid it back on before Hill could see. “We know it as Earth-632. You might have a different term —”

“We mostly call it Earth.”

“Then you haven’t discovered the multiverse yet.”

“Clearly we have not.” Her voice was unreadable. “It sounds like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Let’s hold off on that until we reach the field office.”

“The field office for what?” Beck asked.

“It’s called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” Hill told him. “If they’ve got it on _your Earth_, you might know it as SHIELD.”

Earth-849’s super-soldier had never heard of it. Neither had Beck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Disney still acquired a company called Marvel in this world, but as with _Watchmen_, its extended universe is all about pirates.
> 
> Up Next: Peter Parker is extremely into the whole multiverse thing.


	5. Television Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Parker seemed like the type of bright kid who could build an airtight logical framework for his life without realizing that one of its core premises was fundamentally insane._

Beck did know SHIELD, he soon realized, but not under that name. It was the Enhanced Hazard Command, and it was supposed to be gone.

He’d thought EHC had dissolved years ago. There had been arrests. Hearings. Official transfer of the Avengers Initiative. For Christ’s sake, how did a counterterrorism agency get infiltrated by neo-Nazis, anyway? But apparently all they’d done was change the name.

Their budget seemed smaller, at least. The Orlando field office wasn’t much more than a few drop-ceilinged rooms with a menacing eagle etched on one glass wall.

“Our director’s landing soon,” said Hill, settling at a conference table. “So you can explain what the hell that thing was.”

“Is Washington still the federal capital in your timeline? I would have thought E — I mean, SHIELD — would be based there.”

Hill eyed him carefully. “It is. The director thinks you’re worth coming down for. That’s a compliment,” she said. “And I’ve just been here dealing with… call him a wayward asset.”

Before he could ask anything else, Hill turned and rose. Beck followed her lead, yanking the cape free from his chair and wondering how long he’d be stuck wearing this costume. Then he shook the thought from his head. This might be the most powerful audience he ever got — he needed to make it count.

The director nodded to Hill as he came in. His outfit was, in its own way, as ridiculous as Beck’s: a heavy eyepatch and black leather jacket in the Florida summer.

“This is Nick Fury,” said Hill. “Fury, this is… well, I don’t think he’s given a name.”

“Beck. Um… Officer… Quentin Beck.” He wasn’t sure that was right — G had devoted a whole appendix to her made-up powered military rankings. But he’d have to stick to it. Just like everything else he was about to say.

***

“So you’re from… another dimension.” Fury adjusted his eyepatch with what could have been disbelief, awe, or boredom. “And that thing trashing a mall in suburban Florida — it was actually a reality-hopping robot.”

“It harnessed the power of air,” Beck said nervously. “Water… Earth… Fire… we’ve got to stop them. Before they become _un_stoppable.”

“You seemed to handle that one just fine.”

“It just crossed over. It’s weak.”

“And it enjoys shopping at Abercrombie.”

_Ask questions. Don’t answer them,_ Beck reminded himself. _You’re the new guy in this universe._

“I — I’m sorry. This region hasn’t been habitable on Earth-849 for years. Are you sure you haven’t seen the others?”

“So we’re sticking with the alternate universe story.” Fury laughed. “Got it.”

“It’s not a _story_.” Beck clenched a fist until it bled inside his gauntlet. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be reading forum posts with G. He hadn’t prepared for a professional interrogation. “And we don’t have much time—”

An intercom buzzed. Hill leaned close to the speaker and listened to something Beck couldn’t make out. “Our boy finally showed up,” she said. “They sent him over here.”

“Dammit.” Fury scratched the edge of the eyepatch and looked conspicuously at Beck. “Now is not the time. Or the place. Tell security to send him somewhere else for ten minutes —”

The door opened. Behind it was a sandy-haired teenager in jeans and a t-shirt — honestly it was the kind of clean-cut nerdiness Beck had only aspired to in high school, down to the geeky slogan on the shirt. But the familiarity stopped at his right arm. Its rough, articulated metal looked almost furry as he raised it awkwardly and waved.

“Um, hi — Mr. Fury, Ms. Hill…” He trailed off and looked at Beck, and his expression brightened. “Is that Mysterio?”

Was that the name G had seeded with the news crew? She’d refused to tell him beforehand — it had to be a surprise, she’d said. Only a try-hard picked their own hero name.

Fury glared in turn at both of them. “Peter Parker, this is _Officer Quentin Beck_. He’s a warrior who came from, you know, another dimension. As one does.”

Beck bristled and tried to think of a retort. But before he could, the kid’s eyes went wide. “Oh my god. Multiverse theory is _real_?”

“I don’t know if he’s proof of —”

“Yes,” Beck cut in. “It’s absolutely real.”

He shook out the cape and tried to hold his shoulders straight, ignoring the ache where he’d been hit. _Mysterio_. A little sinister, he thought — none of the solid, guileless charm of an “Iron Man” or a “Captain America.” But the kid didn’t seem to mind.

“That’s amazing!” Parker looked so giddy that Beck felt almost guilty for tricking him. It reminded him of going to college and realizing that there was a world of people who thought like he did — worrying it was too good to be true and vaguely resenting that nobody had told him about it before. “So what type are we talking? Everett’s quantum mechanics many-worlds interpretation? Multi-instance simulation hypothesis? Doppelgänglian chaos bubbles?”

Fury rolled his eye. “Peter, take it down a notch.”

“Sorry.”

Something snapped into place. Whoever Peter Parker was, he wanted to believe. All Beck had to do was keep selling. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t _ever_ apologize for being the smartest person in the room.” And for once, it felt completely natural — because he’d wanted to _be_ this kid. It felt good to see him grin.

“So… which one is it?” asked Parker.

“We don’t know,” said Beck. “All we know is… something terrible happened when we sent our first robotic vehicles through. Something… something went wrong.” _Everyone you love is dead. You’re the last hope for a whole planet. Think about that petition to give Tony Stark his own holiday if you need to cry._ “It destroyed my world. Now I have to stop it from destroying yours.”

“But you stopped it.”

“I stopped one of them. There will be more. And I need…” _You need money. And you need to call the team._ “I need SHIELD’s help if I’m going to survive.”

“What do you mean, survive?” asked Hill.

“I’m not supposed to be in this reality. Every cell in my body is slowly breaking down into poison. I have schematics for the drugs that can stop it — spatiosuppressants, we call them. But the formula sample is back at that…” Beck thought about his bag, probably still stuck in the debris. “...that crystal palace.”

Fury cleared his throat. “Commander Hill can go back and find it.”

“No — no, I can go alone. Just give me access to one of your transport vehicles.”

“Our _transport vehicles_ are not up for rent.” Fury rubbed his eyepatch. “Parker, you’re old enough to drive, right?”

“With an adult in the car—”

“And _Officer Beck_, you’re over the Earth-849 age of majority, I assume?”

“I am, but —”

“Great. Settled. Parker, please drive Mr. Mysterio to the mall.”

***

How well should Earth-849 residents know conventional traffic law? Not well, Beck supposed. The planet’s meager unflooded ground raged with ceaseless blazing storms. He’d spent hours watching disaster footage until he could describe the relentless white comb of a tsunami scraping life from a city, or the strangely liquid play of flames inside a wildfire. He didn’t need footage to remember the ambient haze of dust after the First Battle of New York, the sour tang of felled buildings in the air.

So this new Quentin Beck shouldn’t be appalled by Parker’s driving.

“What do you do for SHIELD?” he asked instead.

Parker kept his hands at careful angles and stared intently at the road. “Oh — I mean, it’s officially an internship. But I’m…” There was a long pause. Beck waited through it. “...I’m like you.”

“A soldier?”

“A hero. Fight villains, save the world, that kind of thing. I’m probably not supposed to talk about it.”

What was he, sixteen? The prosthetic must do something — the earliest child heroes had come up through medical research, before rich parents had started fitting their kids for flight suits and bulletproof jackets.

“I didn’t realize things were so desperate here,” Beck said.

“What are you talking about?”

“We didn’t start recruiting child soldiers until Earth buried the Dakotas.”

Parker laughed, a little unsteadily. “I’m not a child! And I told you, I’m not a soldier. I’m just… I’ve got responsibilities. I mostly stick to my neighborhood.”

Beck wracked his memory for teen Florida heroes. They tended to hide their real identities, but Peter Parker couldn’t be too hard to figure out.

He’d be too young to remember when kids hadn’t aspired to hero status. Hell, Beck barely did — a couple of classmates had secretly dropped out of college and spent their student loans on the first, barely functional Stark flight boot knockoffs. Now they wouldn’t have to do it in secret, and the loans were much bigger.

“Still sounds harsh,” he said aloud.

“Yeah. Well, there aren’t a lot of us left to take care of things. Not after — you know. Or I guess you don’t.”

Beck certainly didn’t see any defensive fire about heroes in the kid’s eyes. He only looked tired.

“I don’t. I’m sorry.”

Parker slammed the brake at a red light, jolting them both in their seats. He watched it warily until it turned. “It was a lot of things,” he said after that. “There was a war, sort of. The government tried to pass laws about power stuff. It, um... made a lot of people mad.”

So incisive political analysis wasn’t the kid’s strong suit. But Beck had heard worse descriptions of the Accords. They’d been Stark’s idea — Beck never bought that his lobbying firms hadn’t written the original regulations. But he’d never been able to control the narrative: a few elite coastal heroes inviting the UN to take away the defensive rights of real Americans. Sure, most Americans had never touched a Stark- or Roxxon-grade energy-beam array, let alone hung one next to a rifle back home. The point was that they _might_, the same way they might win the lottery someday and buy a Ferrari.

_You don’t know anything about this right now,_ he told himself. _You have post-traumatic stress disorder because a lava flow ate your wife or something._ Anyway, Parker was still talking.

“We got over it, but then… it was, I don’t know. A chemical warfare thing. There are lots of books about it. But I…”

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Beck said.

Parker shook his head. “It’s not that. I just don’t remember it. I was sort of… out.” 

He’d gotten dusted, he meant — although Beck wasn’t supposed to know anything about that either. There’d never been as many sleepers as Thanos claimed. _Half of humanity_, even _half of America_. What a joke. But there’d still been a million of them. Ones who hadn’t died from the toxin outright but spent years dreaming in the vent farms while everyone else tried to move on; not living, not quite dead. Parker looked good for somebody who’d woken up just six months ago.

“It must have been hard, right?” Parker asked. “Leaving everything behind.”

Was selling the multiverse thing really going to be this simple? Maybe. Parker seemed like the type of bright kid who could build an airtight logical framework for his life without realizing that one of its core premises was fundamentally insane.

“There was nothing left for me.” Beck told him. In a way, it felt true. Or maybe he just wanted to feel like he wasn’t lying. He’d be doing enough of that soon.

Parker got them through the police cordon with surprising ease. The dust had settled, but glass still crunched under Beck’s feet as he scoured the rubble. He’d convinced the kid to look around the North Wing and bought himself time to dig his bag free, ditching the clumsy gauntlets for his bare hands at the price of more blood. The burner phone card was still there in its side pocket, and a kiosk in the hall still worked, despite its cracked and filthy screen. Beck dialed the warehouse line.

G picked up on the eighth ring, just as Beck was beginning to wonder if anyone had made it back at all.

“Where the _fuck_ did you go?” If she’d been afraid for him before, there was no sign of it now.

“I got picked up by EHC. I think they’re still deciding what to do with me.”

“I thought they had —”

“Yeah, I know, me too,” Beck said. “Anyway, I don’t know how long I’m stuck with them. Just get the hardware somewhere safe and hang on until —”

“No. We have to move things up now. We’ll do Water this —”

Beck started to cut her off; they couldn’t choreograph another fight this week. Then he realized he’d fallen back into the cadence of coupledom — where they both admitted they could understand each other without finishing a single sentence. He shut up and let her explain what he’d already guessed.

“— this week,” G continued. “You can’t give them time to second-guess you.”

She was right, no matter how exhausting that felt right now. “Fine. Get Bill to run some tremors,” he said. “Fid suit’s at the mall, by the way.”

“And you’ve still got the real one?”

“Yeah.” _Real_ was an odd way of putting it, but it felt strangely right. “They’re letting me keep up the Mysterio thing, at —”

“Wait,” G said. “The what thing?”

“That’s the name, isn’t it? Mysterio?”

“Not remotely.” She made an indistinct noise of frustration. “I mean… ‘Mysterio?’ It sounds like a Depression-era stage magician or something —”

Beck heard footsteps in the glass. He thumbed the hangup key and feigned interest in the kiosk. [Appendix D: Electromagnetism took down the data networks in Earth-849. They’ve got it even worse than we do.] Parker looked at the pad too, but his gaze was strangely worried.

“Oh my god. Are your hands okay?”

“They’re fine.” Fuck. He’d left the gauntlets off, hadn’t he? A real soldier would be used to them, or at the very least wouldn’t have taken them off to comb through glass. It was the little tells that were going to get him. “I’ll deal with them later.”

“Your world must be awesome, then,” said Parker. “Because here that’s how you get infections.”

***

Beck had once made the mistake of telling Riva to get some sleep. Riva had saddled him with a ghostwritten Norman Osborne book about “overcoming pain with the power of heroic thinking,” and Beck had realized there was an entire self-help industry based on convincing people that heroes experienced discomfort the same way as plebeians without protective suits or designer drugs or selective nerve cuts.

It was always awkward to realize that a colleague believed something embarrassingly stupid, but Beck found himself wishing he’d at least skimmed some lessons as Parker tweezed broken glass from his fingers in a drugstore parking lot.

“Sorry,” the kid said, dabbing rubbing alcohol on Beck’s skin and plucking out another sliver.

“I told you, stop apologizing. I’ve had a lot worse than this fighting the Elementals.”

[Appendix G: Aggregated firsthand accounts of treating and experiencing broken bones, heat-ray wounds, and other common Earth-849 injuries.]

“Sorry — I mean… sure,” said Parker. “It’s all still so… it’s just so weird, you know?”

“Believe me, I know. You’re taking a real leap of faith here.”

Parker’s prosthetic fingers brushed Beck’s palm. They were rough and cool to the touch, and Beck wondered how bad he should feel about making up war stories in front of a teenager who’d lost an arm and spent a couple of years in a coma.

“It means a lot,” he said. “That you’re helping me.”

“Well, that’s what I do,” said Parker with what sounded like a note of bitterness. “Get a phone call, drop everything, help SHIELD.”

“That seems like serious stuff for... high school?”

“Don’t worry, you’re not like pulling me out of finals or anything. I’m just on a school trip. Or I was supposed to be.”

So Beck wasn’t just lying about trauma to a teenager with the worst luck in the world, he was keeping the kid away from his friends while doing it.

“Hey. Peter,” he said. “The name. Mysterio. Where’d you hear it?”

Parker frowned. “One of my friends saw it on TV. It was probably just a label, honestly — _el hombre misterioso_ or something. I guess they’ve got a lot of Spanish-language news down here.”

“So you’re not from Florida.”

“Me? No,” said Parker. “I’m from… like, I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to tell you.”

Beck stayed silent. Let the kid work out whatever he was going to do.

“I guess I’m going back there anyway,” he said. “So yeah. I live in Queens.”

There was only one Queens hero at SHIELD’s level, though, and he wasn’t a kid. Or at least, that’s what Beck had always figured. If he was wrong, this gambit had escalated even faster than he’d expected. Because now he was getting chauffeured around Florida by Spider-Man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Quentin Beck, obviously, looked like Donnie Darko in high school
> 
> Up Next: Let's give a teenager a low-orbit drone strike network.


	6. Editions of You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“In our world, I don’t think SHIELD has much moral high ground over Peter Parker. If anybody’s going to have this kind of power... there are worse candidates.”_

EHC’s headquarters had been a brutalist triskelion overlooking the Potomac River — shades of prison, panopticon, and fortress. SHIELD’s was a modest suburban office building — shades of a tech support call center where Beck had worked in college. Hill wouldn’t quite say the word “detained,” but when their jet landed, she was clear on the point that he wasn’t leaving. Fury hadn’t said a word to him the whole flight.

Beck assumed they didn’t buy the multiverse; honestly, he’d be a little frightened if they did. But which branching path of explanations had they chosen? Art? Fraud? Insanity? Whatever they picked, he was still stuck in an empty room with a locked door and no idea when he’d get out. 

_Don’t guess._ Guessing was how the grift worked. Produce an impossible question, and people would construct whatever answer they expected. The smarter they were, the more profoundly they’d fall for it.

_People don’t need to be convinced,_ he reminded himself. _They need to like you enough to convince themselves._

Beck leaned back against the bare wall and closed his eyes. If he could make people like him, he wouldn’t have gotten fired in the first place — 

The door squeaked. He opened his eyes. It was Hill.

“There’s something we’d like you to look at.”

***

The grainy clip — which was definitely _not_ videoshopped — had been shot poorly in dim light, and at first Beck saw only roiling water. Then he made out the hand. Its plasticine surface deformed as it rose from the surface, drawing a greyish wave in its wake. The camera’s operator zoomed, but on the wrong area — and when they’d corrected their mistake, there were two arms and something that could be halfway called a face. Then the angle went wild as the camera tumbled downwards, and the screen in SHIELD’s conference room went black.

“Somebody at Cyber Command spotted it in a web sweep,” said Hill. “It’s been on videotube for a couple of hours. Satnav tagging puts it at the Missouri border. I mean, if Missouri exists in...”

“That’s it. That’s Water,” Beck said, slamming his palm on the table in what he hoped conveyed emphasis. “We have to stop it.”

“Yes. You’ve said that.” Hill looked at Fury, who still hadn’t spoken. “Sir, if the tagging’s right, it matches some other netizen reports of unusual power tech. It might be at least worth checking out.”

“Our job isn’t anomalies. Our job is hazards,” Fury said. He took a deep, conspicuous breath. “Ask the corporations if they’re running tests. Otherwise? Leave it.”

“No!” Beck tried both palms this time. More emphasis. “Please — you fools! You... damn fools! I can’t let this happen again —”

“Sir, please calm down.” Hill disconnected the projector and closed her netbook. “I’ll be watching the situation very closely,” she said. Then her voice softened. “You’re not the only one who understands losing battles. Whoever you are.”

It was another eighteen hours before the levee broke and the Mississippi River flooded a dead town.

Lincoln had chosen that place: a vent-farm company town, hastily constructed and nearly abandoned when the sleepers awoke. She’d barely agreed to the plan anyway, no matter how clearly Beck had explained it: _No damage, no hero._ They had to destroy America — at least a little bit — to save it.

But for a moment, watching the footage on Hill’s screen, he understood. The breach looked like a wound. The current had gouged a new channel into the riverbank, turning streets into canals, empty buildings into islands. _He_ had planned this, and he’d done it as casually as changing a number in a sheet of code.

Still. Compared to the damage Stark had brought to New York, it was nothing.

“We got lucky here — as far as these things go,” Hill told him. “But sightings have it headed south. Toward St. Louis. I mean, if —”

“Yes. St. Louis exists in my world.” He still wasn’t sure if she was mocking him, indulging him, or something else. “We…”

_Don’t say you have to stop it._

“We should go,” he said. “I can handle it now — but I don’t know how much longer.”

“Fury signed off on it. But not as a one-person job.” Hill rubbed at her eyes. “We haven’t seen anything like this since… honestly, I don’t know.”

“I can’t put anybody else in danger.”

“That’s why you need backup,” she said. “He wouldn’t be my first choice. But he’s what we’ve got on deck.”

“Who are you talking about?” Beck asked, feigning confusion.

“His codename’s Spider-Man. We’re picking him up at Dulles in two hours.”

***

When Spider-Man stepped onto the jet, Beck wondered if he’d gotten Parker’s identity wrong. The suit's metallic flex-kevlar revealed nothing asymmetrical, only two impossibly solid steel arms with those famous wrist-mounted grapplers. It took a moment to spot the difference between the exo-suit and the prosthetic, and to recognize the latter from their meeting in Florida, mechanically expanded. Then the voice filter activated.

“Come on — can’t I at least take the mask off?” it said. “I’m like… sixty-three percent sure he already knows.”

Hill examined Beck for a moment and sighed. “Fine.”

Not really a surprise after that.

Hill watched them in uncomfortable silence for far too long. When Washington had disappeared from the window, leaving green patchwork below them, she stood. “I have some work to do with Fury,” she said. “Please don’t burn a hole in the jet.”

Beck looked at his gauntlets, but Parker gave the perfunctory laugh of someone recognizing a reference.

“Mr. Stark almost did that once,” he said once Hill closed the cabin door. “I mean Tony Stark. Iron Man. Did you ever meet him where you’re from?”

“No. Never. Must have died.” 

“Ours is dead too.” Parker seemed ready to say more, but he stopped as if he couldn’t get the words out.

“So he was… a friend?” Beck asked.

Of course he was a friend. Practically everyone at Stark Industries knew Stark recruited him during the Accords. The “child soldier” ad lib seemed almost too accurate now. What would the kid have been, thirteen? How old even was he now? Was Beck supposed to count the sleep year? The consensus had been yes, generally speaking — but with Parker that seemed wrong.

“Not just a friend,” Parker said. “He saved my life. A lot of lives. And he died doing it.”

There. They’d reached the point where somebody brought up the dust cure. Because Tony Stark had done _one good thing_ in his life, solved one _single_ problem that didn’t involve flight suits and lasers, and used himself as a guinea pig. So that was his legacy. Not the man who could have given the world clean energy and decided to go punch things instead…

_Stop it_, Beck thought.

He couldn’t go down that path. Heroes patched up the world. Monsters tried to improve it. Solving racism turned you into a Killmonger Stevens. Climate change, a Thanos. Global conflict… if the rumors were right, Tony Stark and the Ultron virus. For fuck’s sake, trying to fix _heroes_ had gotten everyone a civil war.

“Did he give you the suit?” Beck asked. This version of him _didn’t know anything._ He was from Earth-849, a reality custom-built to make this one look good. “And, um, the…”

“The arm? That was a different company. The suit… he helped a little.”

Parker didn’t elaborate, and Beck let the subject drop. “How was the school trip?” he asked.

“Dunno. I guess they’re probably having fun right now.” Parker looked out the window. “Have you ever like, been to the Midwest?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s pretty flat, isn’t it?”

“Probably.” Beck caught the implication. SHIELD really was desperate if it was sending an aerial acrobat to a mile-wide river. “Hey,” he said. “Tell me about Florida. Or school. Or something.”

“That’s gonna be boring. Or probably classified.”

“Just, I don’t know — normal things.” Anything to take the kid’s mind off the impending fight, because the last thing they needed was an unpredictable genius who’d thought through all the angles. “Boredom sounds better than anything I’ve done lately.”

It was not, in fact, boring. By the end of the flight, Beck wished it had been. Peter Parker colored every memory with guilt: that he’d woken up and someone else hadn’t, that he’d tried to drop his hero persona for a few weeks, that he’d done it because of a girl who probably thought he’d ghosted her now.

And the whole time Beck wanted to shake him and tell him to stop worrying, because these were the years he could screw up and still get over it. The years might even last forever, because the kid was a hero, and heroes got redemption arcs. He was just too determined to feel things.

But this version of Quentin Beck couldn’t say that. This was the version that tried to feel things too.

When they reached St. Louis and the edge of the river, his version nearly wept at the sight of the Gateway Arch intact. His hand trembled slightly as he rubbed sweat from his temple, and he didn’t curse himself for staging his fights in the most unbearably hot parts of America, wonder if his ex-girlfriend had somehow manipulated his decisions to torment him, and tell himself to knock it off because paranoia was why they split in the first place.

This version stood by Parker and watched water roil near the cement bridge, and he wasn’t worried that the kid would see him duck around an overpass before his holographic double arrived. He was too focused to notice Parker pulling something from his suit but decide to ignore it.

A glassy column surged from the water. It burst to reveal a lithe and hovering figure in silvery white, which spread its arms in triumph and rose — and from the right angle the arch framed its limbs as though it were ready to crack the stone from within like an egg.

Then three streaks of fire sliced the sky. In a few moments, before Beck could even start to run, the creature was gone.

When he could breathe again, he looked at Parker. The kid’s mask was up. He’d replaced it with a pair of tacky, tinted glasses. And he seemed much less shocked than either version of Beck.

The crowd that showed up later, when the mask was down and the glasses gone, didn’t care who’d won the fight or how. They cared about who they knew, and that was Spider-Man — a real New York hero.

They asked about Beck eventually. He swallowed his pride and caution and let Parker introduce him, adolescent enthusiasm for _the multiverse_ evident even through the filter. They shook hands. Posed for pictures. Exactly what Beck had wanted, except he was stuck with the nagging question of _what the hell were those things_? He tried to pass his distraction off as solemn melancholy.

As the crowd diffused and they headed for the jet, someone called one of Beck’s names.

“Hey, Mysterio.” It was G, wearing an ancient sundress and cradling an alligator-skin purse. Beck glanced ahead, gauging whether Parker was out of earshot.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Just wanted to thank our hero,” she said in a put-on drawl. “And say you should come see me sometime.”

She handed him a motel key scrawled with a room number, winked badly, and walked away.

***

“What’s EDITH?” Beck asked that afternoon, back at the jet. Parker was returning to his extended field trip, and Fury had only left his cabin to offer a grudging congratulations to them both. That left Beck and Hill alone in a dusty airstrip waiting room, a low stack of vending-machine snacks on the table between them.

“Did Peter tell you about that?” She closed her eyes for a moment and rested her head on one palm. “Sometimes I can’t believe he’s even kept his identity secret so long.”

“He told me a man named Tony Stark had given it to him,” said Beck. “Some kind of self-defense system.”

Hill laughed caustically. “Drop the ‘self.’ It’s a low-orbit drone strike network. He’s just the only person with credentials, thanks to Stark. We want to use it, we have to bring him in.”

“That seems... strange.”

“My bar for _strange_ has gotten pretty high,” Hill said. “Even before I found out about the multiverse, obviously—”

Beck winced. “Look. You don’t have to keep pretending to trust me,” he said. “All I’m asking for is help. Not belief.”

Hill ignored him, opening a packet of crackers with a neat, nearly mechanical twist of the fingers. She flicked one onto the table between them and crushed it slowly with her thumb. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad we’re on the same page. About a couple of things.”

“Does that include the policy of giving a teenager a murder satellite?” he asked.

“If it does, it’s a moot point.”

“In my world, this kind of advanced technology is in the hands of the government. In the hands of the _people_.” Damn, that had been too much, hadn’t it?

Hill only raised her eyebrows slightly. “In our world, I don’t think SHIELD has much moral high ground over Peter Parker,” she said. “If anybody’s going to have this kind of power... there are worse candidates.”

“Maybe nobody should have it,” said Beck.

She dropped one of the cracker fragments on the peeling tile, where a procession of sugar ants carried it away.

“Too bad. You can’t take some things back,” she said as the ants etched their line across the floor. “And if Stark hadn’t built this, somebody else would have.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“It’s better if I do.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Beck finally gave up on the gauntlets and pulled them off, realizing how bitterly hungry he was.

“You know, I’ve barely seen this reality,” he said. “Would you… would it be all right if I went out for a bit?”

Hill hesitated. “Sure, why the hell not. Just leave the gear locked up and take a shower. We keep spare clothes on the jet for assets.” She brushed the table clean and slid the packet toward him. “And none of _any_ of this leaves the room, okay? The agency isn’t what it used to be, but we can still disappear you to the Raft just fine.”

The crackers were probably years old — Beck couldn’t imagine the last time anybody had needed to use the machine. Not that he cared.

“Can’t I just fly away?” he asked.

She laughed. “Maybe you really are from another dimension,” she said. “If you don’t think Stark gave us some options for that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Peter Parker: as bad at keeping secrets as Tom Holland!  
\- It seems more plausible that the satellite is actually a [Zephyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr)-style super-high-altitude drone that’s… full of other drones, I guess. But "killpseudosat" doesn't have the same ring.  
\- The Raft is actually only 50% horrifying extrajudicial black site and 50% Club Fed for rich guys who cause too much property damage.
> 
> Up Next: "I'm from another dimension" isn't quite as convincing as they hoped.


	7. Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“If I think about today too much, I’m going to break something. And everything in this goddamn room is either irreplaceable or breathing.”_

The motel took three tries to find, and the cab bill nearly exhausted the money Hill had given him. It was still a relief to finally drop the act and the weight of the suit — like climbing out of a gravity well.

Lincoln answered the scratched metal door. “My god, it’s good to see you alive,” she said. “So I’m sorry it’s going to be miserable in here.”

She wasn’t wrong. Beck picked his way around stacks of black crates until he reached a half-moon of visible carpet, occupied only by G and her netbook. He sat beside her.

“The kid has a killsat,” he told her.

G nodded absently and scrolled through a liveforum feed.

“Tony Stark built a goddamn domestic drone strike system. And he gave it to a teenager. And he called it EDITH, by the way, because when he builds something he can give it a half-decent name —”

“Quentin. Please. Shut up about the killsat.” She scrolled back up a few screens, and Beck caught a photo of himself with Parker. “If I think about today too much, I’m going to break something. And everything in this goddamn room is either irreplaceable or breathing.”

Riva squeezed out from the kitchenette. “We salvaged most of the drones,” he said. “They’re spread too wide for one strike to hit. But we can’t do this again. Not if they’re gonna send a real hero with a —”

“I said shut up! About the killsat!” G switched tabs with a loud strike of the keys. “Our alternate-dimension story’s getting traction. The _actual plan_ part of the plan is going just fine.”

“What about the conspiracy theories?” Beck asked.

“Surprisingly good reach on ‘black ops mission gone wrong.’” G paused to refresh the feeds. “A few organic ones, too. Some fangirls think you’re an escaped MKULTRA experiment fighting the psychically projected embodiments of your dead family. It’s fucking Jungian.”

Lincoln cleared her throat conspicuously. “But they’re mostly talking about the monster, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly that,” Lincoln said. “They’re frightened.”

“But the thing existed for all of five minutes.”

“This isn’t New York,” she said. “They don’t see people popping in to knock over a building every couple months.”

G pushed the netbook off her lap. She slid up the wall to face them, and Beck realized he felt strangely vulnerable without the shell of his ersatz armor.

“That’s the fucking point of showing up here,” said G. “Bringing hero culture to the masses!”

She laughed, and Beck started to join out of habit. But it didn’t feel all that funny. He’d imagined pure gratitude after a fight. People looking at him the way they’d looked at Stark. But even if it happened… what kind of person was fooled by a man who hid behind corners and watched a ghost do his work? While a high-schooler casually held life and death in his hands?

“I want them,” he said. “The glasses. EDITH.”

G ran a hand through her hair — the humid air raised all its broken strands around her face, made her look younger, less severe. “We don’t have time for that. We have to get the kid out of the picture.”

“That’ll _get_ him out,” Beck said. “He wants to be normal, G. All we need to do is give him permission.”

“All we need to do is get back on track. Anything more complicated — do it when the world’s figured out what they think of you, okay?”

G sat and hunched over the feeds again. When she opened a tab, Beck saw a bright sketch of himself in three-quarter profile: slick hair, squared shoulders, eyes fixed on something far away.

People like Hill — they wanted to be paranoid. But outside, they wanted to believe, he thought. They _wanted_ more heroes. God, he despised it. God, it felt good.

He pointed at the picture. “Hey, will you save that one?”

She clicked, viewed source: _Mysterio <3.jpeg._ Saved it to the desktop.

_You have fangirls._

“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of reality to work through.”

***

> _Phase: Fire Elemental, Codename “Molten Man”  
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada  
Time: 23:37 Local_
> 
> _Blocking: Elemental surfaces south of Mirage casino, T+5. Maximum four-phase fight, approx. 5 minutes per phase. Telegraphing attacks and transition points should encourage pedestrian clearance. No casualties expected._
> 
> _Ground team will leave the fiduciary suit and earpiece at the drop point. Bill runs point on fight choreography, Guterman monitors and coordinates._
> 
> _Location choice was supposed to deter SHIELD from involving a teenager, but no dice there. We’re telling them fire makes the elemental more powerful, though — should neutralize drone strike options._
> 
> _We’re not letting anybody fuck this one up._

***

The first shots of the molten creature appeared around the Strip that week, and a few hours later, the jet headed for Las Vegas.

“How are you liking Earth-632 so far?” Hill asked casually. She’d spotted Beck a few hundred dollars in the last few days — interdimensional warriors didn’t have to feel ashamed of being broke. Back at SHIELD’s headquarters, he’d wandered the DC outskirts realizing that he hadn’t even left New York since Stark fired him. He’d spent four years tending that one moment of bitterness. Now the world was opening up before him, and he was terrified.

They hadn’t planned beyond the four fights — there was a tacit agreement against tempting fate. With enough time and money, maybe they could get gloves and a suit and make the illusion real. Or he could retire from the laurels of the victories, spend the rest of his life giving inspirational talks and writing his memoirs. Or he could hand off the tech to Riva and disappear into some upstate forest… as solitary as he’d been for years, he supposed. But now people would care that he was gone.

“It’s beautiful,” Beck told her. As closely as Hill seemed to watch him, she’d never accompanied him outside. _Not much left of us at SHIELD,_ she’d said. _I’m practically doing the work of a whole bureau._

“I’m not sure if you’re going to love or hate Vegas, then,” Hill said. “Either way we’ll head to the Strip as soon as Peter lands.”

“I don’t want kids involved in this,” he told her, although by now it was a rote and futile protest.

“Well, he’d tell you he’s not a kid. Despite the fact that we had to get him here by diverting a whole high-school class to Las Vegas. Which I wouldn’t normally describe as adult behavior.”

“Can’t you just let him be?”

“He’s the only active Avenger. That might not mean something to you, but it sure does to Fury.” She eyed the cabin door and lowered her voice. “We used to be ready to save the world a couple times a year. Now… officially, we barely exist. We’re pulling the last of our threads,” she said. “He’d never say it, but unofficially? I think Fury’s glad these things are raising hell. Because at least we don’t feel so goddamn useless.”

“Hey… how’d Peter get into this, anyway? This whole hero thing.”

“Prosthetics experiment. Company called Oscorp,” she said. “The cling fibers are supposed to be an industrial thing — pick up boxes better, I don’t know. He figured out the multi-surface applications... as kids do. He’s been sort of building the powers out ever since.”

“Why spiders?”

“Spiders climb walls.”

“Lots of things climb walls.”

“Then I don’t know. You’d have to ask him about it,” Hill said. “We’re getting close, by the way. You might as well go change.”

Alone in a jet storage room, Beck pulled the suit from a hanger. It felt heavier than ever. At least deserts were cold at night, he thought, unbuttoning his shirt. And no matter how stifling it was, at least he wouldn’t feel so exposed anymore...

Beck’s fingers caught something hard as he slipped the shirt off. Slowly, he ran his fingers along a seam and picked the thread out with his fingernails. A slender strip of metal and plastic slid into his hand. A satnav tracker.

So that was why Hill had let him out: she’d hoped he’d lead her to something incriminating. Hopefully all he’d given her was a now-empty motel room and a few phone kiosks. But it was an unsettling reminder of how stupidly, suddenly serious this plan had gotten.

***

Everything in Las Vegas offered the hypersaturated illusion of something else — the Luxor’s Sphinx, the Paris casino’s Eiffel Tower. Beck could see both from his vantage point at the edge of the Strip. Mysterio would fit right in.

“Anything in your quadrant?” Hill asked in his earpiece.

“Nothing yet. But it’s coming,” he said. “I can feel it.”

Wait, that sounded like some kind of power that he’d have to keep track of later, G was going to be —

“Parker, what about you?”

“Oh — um, nothing.” The kid’s mind seemed miles away.

“Parker, are you _in_ your quadrant?”

“Of course! I mean, maybe not the dead center. Or technically the perimeter...”

Beck watched a garish casino display blink the time: 11:35. “Come on, give us a little space,” he told Hill. “We’ve got this covered.”

Hill’s mic clicked off.

“You doing okay?” Beck asked. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”

“It’s not that.” Parker paused, and Beck heard the thwick of a web grappler hitting a wall. “Hey — there have to be… millions of Earths, right? Billions?”

“Sure. Probably.” Still no sign of Riva or the drones — they’d better get there soon, if he wanted the cloaking to work.

“Like, one for every big decision we make? Which is like quadrillions, I guess. Centillions.”

“Peter, I’m not sure now is the best time to talk about this.”

“I just need to know.” His voice would have sounded shaky even without the static. “If I can’t save somebody — like, there’s a world where I actually did.”

Before Beck could answer, a meteoric light flashed above him, and his body disappeared into the night. A molten creature hit the pavement, iron skin crackling with flame. And the avatar rose to meet it.

“Okay. It’s here.” It was Hill again. “Peter, converge at the south side. You’re doing crowd control.”

The earpiece was quiet for a moment too long. “Sorry. I can’t. I’ve got friends here,” Parker said finally. “I have to get them somewhere safe.”

“That’s —”

His other earpiece chimed. “Where’s the kid?” G asked. “Bill’s getting nervous.”

Beck swapped back. “Hey, Peter. Where are you?”

“Big Ferris wheel. They’re at the top of it, they’re gonna —”

“He’s at —”

“Yeah, I heard,” G said. “This is great.”

It was perfect. The kid was out of the way, and Beck’s avatar was charging its gloves, its mirrored head a kaleidoscope of casino lights. It began to speak —

“Quentin.” Hill’s voice cut in. Her tone was deadly smooth. “I’m giving us a private channel for a moment. Because I want to know if there’s anything you want to tell me.”

“What are you talking about?” The avatar slashed a laser burst across the elemental’s metal skin. “I’ve got this under—”

“Not about the fight,” said Hill. “About Stark Industries. In good old Earth-632. We’re going to have a talk.”

“I... I have to focus!” Out on the street, Beck’s avatar had flown to face a handful of screaming gamblers and retracted its helmet. “Don’t panic,” it called above the crowd. [Precanned Concern Exclamation #3, Photo Op Pose #8.] “Just get to safety.”

Beck, at the edge of the Strip, tried frantically to keep breathing. “G,” he said. “What the hell did they just find?”

“Ughh… fuck.” G sounded less panicked than annoyed. It was soothing. “I hoped this wasn’t going to come up.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Some forum nerds found you in an old Stark Industries keynote video.”

This could not be happening. Not yet. He should have had at least a month before somebody connected the dots.

“Okay,” he said, watching himself dodge a flaming iron claw. “How are the backup theories doing?”

The elemental knocked a lamppost into the air, smashing a video screen. _You can do this,_ Beck thought. _You're Mysterio. The man of mystery._ Damn. It really did sound sinister, didn’t it?

“Well, reaction to ‘he’s your alternate universe counterpart’ is not as positive as I’d hoped.”

Beck was almost relieved. They’d finally found a limit to human credulity. “How’s ‘former identity of an ambiguously insane vigilante’ doing?” he asked.

“Believable but uninspiring,” G said. “Some guy named Moon Knight’s got the crazy thing locked up.”

“I don’t care what the fucking net thinks. I care about SHIELD.” The elemental stormed forward, and Beck scrambled to stay in the drone cloud. “I’m getting shipped to goddamn hero Gitmo if Hill doesn’t buy this.”

“Then we need to get her mind off it.” She cut the line for a moment. “Okay. Bill’s directing the monster to the Linq. Out toward Parker’s friends.”

Beck started to protest. But they weren’t putting anybody in danger, he reminded himself. They ran every beat of these fights. It was a good strategy, good PR… and it had nothing to do with the chance of this kid talking about _him_ the way he’d talked about Tony Stark.

Riva pushed the animation speed higher, and the creature lumbered down the Strip, leaving a trail of broken asphalt in its wake. Beck ran before Mysterio could leave him behind. He panted for breath as the creature whipped his avatar against a palm tree and the drones smashed it to splinters.

“Do the… the nuclear option,” he said.

G expressed something between laughter and strangulation. “That’s gonna take a fucking week.”

The wheel loomed above him. Someone cheered. Someone screamed.

“We’ll go faster.”

“The lab’s not even set up.”

“Then have Vicky fucking do it!” He slung the bag off and ducked behind a cement pillar. A figure dropped from the edge of the wheel, dressed in black — Parker. “This is my call,” he told G. “Drop it all. Now. And tell Bill we’re ready.”

The kid watched Beck’s avatar stop and face the creature. It spread its arms and let energy course along its gauntlets. Riva had an eye for Christ imagery.

“Wait. What are you doing?” Parker asked.

“What I should have done a long time ago,” Beck told him. As his avatar dived into the elemental’s molten core, and the projected burst of laser and iron flashed bright enough to rival Vegas’s lights, he realized he had no idea what he meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- This chapter would be unrealistic in our world because everyone is moving much too quickly for the human flytrap that is the Las Vegas Strip.
> 
> Up Next: Everyone gets very sad. Especially Peter Parker.


	8. Definitive Gaze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Four sustained profound, irreversible, and violent mental debilitation. Understandable, after years of what amounted to psychological torture. The fifth... was you.”_

> _ **Second-Layer Identity D  
Codename “The Subject”** _
> 
> _Breadcrumbs, Wave 1:_
> 
> _* Anonymous Text Post: “Project Mysterio Subject List” [contains keywords: QUENTIN BECK, VIRGINIA BECK, CYRANOID LTD., DANIEL BERKHART, OTHER PARTICIPANTS TBD]_  
_* Leaked spreadsheet: “Site Results: Cyranoid Headquarters” [contains keyword: CYRANOID LTD., contains coordinates: Abandoned Lab Site, contains meaningless numbers]_  
_* Abandoned Lab Site: “Coercive Persuasion And Memory Alteration Protocol, MYSTERIO Method” [contains keywords: MYSTERIO, CYRANOID LTD.]_  
_* New Jersey Lab Office: “Cyclone Suit Design Documents” [contains keyword: PARTICIPANT TBD]_  
_* New Jersey Lab Office: “Sandman Suit Design Documents” [contains keyword: DANIEL BERKHART]_  
_* New Jersey Lab Office: “Hydro-Man Suit Design Documents” [contains keyword: PARTICIPANT TBD]_  
_* New Jersey Lab Office: “Molten Woman Suit Design Documents” [contains keyword: VIRGINIA BECK]_  
_* New Jersey Lab Office: “Mysterio Suit Design Documents” [contains keyword: QUENTIN BECK, contains server address and file encryption password]_
> 
> _Notes: We may need to add additional documents between B and C if nobody bites on the coordinates within a day or two. Same after C-H if they’re too fast at working toward the “real” lab owner. SHIELD’s involvement complicates things, obviously, but they’re probably too short-staffed to chase down some net conspiracy theory, at least until it leads all the way back to Stark Industries._
> 
> _We’ll drop some of the angsty stuff in the H files — building up sympathy BEFORE the Stark connection is vital here. Once we’ve got the public on your side, we can get the physical evidence in place. And they’ll all be ready to turn._

***

Beck woke up strapped to a hospital bed and pieced together the night before.

The shockwave had knocked him breathless, he remembered. He’d hit the ground thinking that real heroes couldn’t possibly hurt this much, with their shock-absorbent suits and predictive computing routines.

Then there’d been a hand on his shoulder and Parker’s brittle voice repeating _Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,_ and Beck had propped himself up and felt the kid’s arms around him and realized that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually hugged somebody and then realized how amazingly pathetic that sounded… and then he’d managed to stop and pretend, for just a second, that he deserved this.

After that it was a blur of feigning unconsciousness and, at some point, actually passing out. Now he was missing his outer armor, restrained by padded nylon, and completely lost.

His new room was nearly empty and garishly wholesome. Walls plastered with inspirational posters and a fading pain chart. Paint job suggesting a bad Kandinsky or a middle-schooler’s geometry homework. Desert light slipping around the bars of a single deep-set window. And beyond the door, he could just make out voices — Hill and Fury.

“It can’t be real,” Fury was saying. “Tony would never get involved in something like this.”

“Sir, he’s made questionable choices,” said Hill. “I mean, Ultron had a hell of a lot more fallout —”

“That was different. He’d never justify working on humans — besides himself.”

“Neither would we. And yet it happened,” she said.

Fury’s voice rose. “We didn’t know a goddamn thing about that.”

“I’m just saying, what’s easier to believe — reality-hopping monsters, or Stark’s people crossing one more line?” Hill sighed. “It even explains the armor tech. I can't even read it, let alone jam it. Only Stark could get away with something like that."

“Consider it _under consideration_,” said Fury. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

The door swung open. Curtains up.

***

“I told you, I’m from — I’m from Earth-849.”

Beck wasn’t faking the note of desperation in his voice. They’d been asking oblique questions for half an hour, and the safety of his cover story felt flimsier than ever. His wrists were damp with sweat beneath the cuffs. Maybe they’d seen through the leaks. Maybe they were just toying with him.

Fury leaned back in his chair. “Mr. Beck, does the name ‘Cyranoid’ mean anything to you?”

“A psychological... thing, isn’t it? A — a human with something speaking through it. Like a puppet.”

“And nothing else.”

“I don’t…” He tried to raise a hand to his brow in confusion, but the cuff stopped it short. “Please, just help me. I don’t understand. Is there something I’m supposed to know?”

Hill glanced sidelong at Fury and took over. “I’m sorry. We’re not trying to confuse you. I’ll try to explain.” Her hair was unwashed, and she looked as tired as Beck felt. “If you’re from an alternate universe, you must expect to have a counterpart here. Another Quentin Beck.”

Beck nodded, wincing at an ache in his neck.

“Well, your... counterpart was a projection technologist at Stark Industries, until he was supposedly fired four years ago.”

“Supposedly?”

“Some documents suggest that... your counterpart volunteered for a research project — something codenamed MYSTERIO.” Hill hesitated and looked at Fury again. “I’m not sure how to…”

“The documents call it a mind-control program,” Fury said. “_Supposedly._”

“Right,” she continued. “The goal was a division of teched heroes implanted with false memories and unwavering devotion to Stark’s cause — which, if you’re not already familiar —”

“Was the safety of humanity,” Fury said.

“Through... creative means. And sometimes counterproductive ones.”

Hill looked at a blank space between Beck’s bed and the window, as if waiting for a reaction.

“The elementals are real,” he said quietly.

“Five subjects, trained to act as a team. Like the Avengers or the Monkees, depending on perspective.” Hill’s tone was carefully level. “Four sustained profound, irreversible, and violent mental debilitation. Understandable, after years of what amounted to psychological torture. The fifth... was you.”

The room fell silent, and a tremor shivered down Beck’s hand. “Please. This isn’t — it isn’t funny. There’s still one of them left. I have to –”

“Berkhart. His name is Daniel Berkhart, codenamed Sandman. And according to the records, you once worked together.”

“I —” Beck’s voice cracked. He clutched at the bed’s support until his nails scraped the plastic. “No. God, please no.”

“So you remember something after all,” said Fury.

“I think that I remember... everything.”

***

> _DRUGS IN THE WATER_
> 
> _you know but you never really get used to it, you’re never prepared when the walls gain infinite depth and a moment stretches to the lifespan of a star. bad trip and they throw you in the deprivation tank where the mind eats itself and the body drifts apart. good one and the scientists scribble notes with soft pens and take you to_
> 
> _PLAYBACK ROOMS_
> 
> _of false histories and an ever-expanding deck of pasts on loop tapes — twenty hours, thirty hours, high-tech fully immersive virtual reality simulation. people you know with codenames you don’t, teammates you last saw in the flesh before they locked you all apart, reinforced the walls to isolate_
> 
> _THE SCREAMING_
> 
> _before electroshock and after, only vitrified silence in the awful space between. you forget that you asked for this, that it was preferable to being cast outside, disgraced, forgotten. now the world will remember your name when you_
> 
> _SAVE THEM ALL_
> 
> _from the next thanos and the next chitauri corp. and all the other entities that have worn channels of hatred on the freshly sandpapered surfaces of your mind. until one day they pit you against a new threat constellation called the elementals, while they whisper the words_
> 
> _CONTAINMENT BREACH_
> 
> _behind closed doors. and in a rare moment of clarity you ask whether you have always hated the elementals. you ask if you have asked this before. then the_
> 
> _NEEDLES COME OUT_
> 
> _and there is no more uncertainty or hesitation. only the confidence of a true hero and the forever whispering of the pens spelling out your name..._
> 
> _MYSTERIO_
> 
> _[If you think of something even worse, go ahead and throw it in. Just use those big sad eyes while you’re doing it.]_

***

They left Beck alone when he asked. He could barely speak through panicked breaths and nearly toppled his bed at the sight of tranquilizer IVs. In retrospect, he almost regretted it — it sold the illusion, sure, but it nixed any chance of getting somebody to free his hands. Hours later his face itched with dried salt, the nylon was digging ridges into his wrists, and he remembered uneasily that Hollywood's great method acting performances had often ended with a nervous breakdown.

The door opened, and Beck turned away from the midday sun to look. It was Parker, dressed down in a cheap tourist shirt with a price label still stuck to its sleeve.

“I didn’t know where you were,” he said.

Beck tried for a wry smile and tugged at one restraint. “I’d have tried to find you, but…”

“It isn’t fair. I told them you saved me. From…” Parker hesitated. “They were people, weren’t they? Not robots. Not AIs.”

“I — I don’t know. I don’t want to believe it.” Beck gazed out the window again. A fly landed on the bars and skittered toward the light, becoming a black spot on the dull glass.

“They were people. They were… insane, they were hurting,” Parker said. “And we killed them.”

“No. _I_ killed...”

Beck thought past the fight in Vegas. Back to St. Louis and a drone strike against a clear sky. No. How the fuck had he forgotten?

_He_ was supposed to be struggling with unearned guilt from taking a life. People were supposed to sympathize, tell him to forgive himself, say it wasn’t his fault. But Beck had known this kid for all of a week, and he was sure he’d never forgiven himself for anything.

“We didn’t do this,” he said. “We weren’t the ones who made these suits. We weren’t the ones who sacrificed helpless people because we thought it would save the world.”

Parker started to speak, stopped, and finally spilled the words. “The last one had your name.”

“She…” Beck looked away, back to the window. The fly was throwing itself against the glass, its stuttering morse-code buzz filling the silence. “We were on the same engineering team. We’d only been married a few months. I didn’t — I didn’t want her to follow me…”

He took a deep breath. _Big sad eyes. Think about…_ but he didn’t have anything to cry over, did he? A job he’d lost ages ago, a woman he’d left twice. Years of numb monotonous not-caring, an empty life spent imagining versions of himself he’d never be…

There it was. He blinked back tears and tried to wipe them away with a bound hand.

“I’m sorry. Can you… can you loosen these? I just…”

Parker slipped the straps off, and Beck tried to flex circulation back into his fingers.

“There’s still one of them out there, isn’t there?” Parker asked.

“His name was Daniel. He was like… a brother.” That hadn’t been in the dossier, but it felt right. “There has to be something left of him in there — but I don’t think SHIELD will give me a chance to find it. They’ll just kill him or throw him in the Raft.” Beck paused portentously. “They don’t seem big on giving people choices.”

Parker looked at the floor. “I guess not.” He swung his backpack off with deliberate teenage indifference. “I might have something that can help.”

It took eons for the kid to open the bag, eons more for him to find a small case and reveal its contents. An eternity to unfold the glasses. Sapphire lenses, aviator frames — as tacky as anything Stark had ever made.

“I couldn’t possibly take those.”

“It’s not just missiles,” Parker said. “It’s… honestly it’s kind of scary. You can see _everything_.”

Beck took the glasses in both hands and slid them gently over his eyes. The world was colder through them, and he ignored a twinge of guilt when he met Parker’s eyes. “How do I look?”

“You look like him,” Parker said. “Yesterday, I would have thought that was a good thing.”

Yesterday, Beck would have felt a lot better about hearing it, too.

***

Las Vegas wasn’t a more honest city in daylight, only a less interesting one.

Beck watched it recede from a first-class seat on the plane, booked with one of the frighteningly powerful backdoors Stark had built into… well, as far as Beck could tell, almost everything. The man had probably had a hand in rebuilding the American net after Ultron, and god knew how much Stark Industries cryptography had gotten through the certifications.

The armor was checked in a pelican case, recovered with the help of EDITH and a hapless hospital aide. She’d recognized Beck from the news and seen what she wanted to see: a man who’d gone through hell and needed help. The drones were headed back to New York, and G had gotten his story across the net. If SHIELD wanted to hunt him down, they were going to have to be nice about it.

It should have felt wonderful. Everyone could see Stark as he really was: an arrogant and dangerous dilettante who’d hurt anyone for a chance to save the world. Soon they’d realize that they’d always known — they’d just been waiting for somebody else to say it first.

And it was Stark’s own fault, too. All of it. Including breaking a teenage boy’s heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Guterman’s main job now is writing MKULTRA hurt/comfort about her ex-boyfriend.  
\- [Cyranoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyranoid) are the kind of weird shit that GrimCU Tony Stark was probably really into and made his employees learn about.  
\- Tony Stark was also a one-man [crypto war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip).
> 
> Up Next: Things go to hell, Part I.


	9. 11:59

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Nobody listens to people like us, G. You can be the smartest guy in the room, the most qualified, and no one cares. Unless you're flying around with a cape, or shooting lasers with your hands —”_
> 
> _“That is _such_ bullshit."_

Vicky Snow rented out an aging hotel bar in Chelsea for the celebration. The rest of the crew was there when Beck arrived — Riva nursing scotch and coffee, Lincoln sipping Pimm’s beside him, and G with her usual can of cheap beer, watching ships pass from the window.

“You made it,” Snow said mildly. “Jan was worried you lost the suit.”

Beck tried to put Vegas out of his mind. “I’ll have it to her tomorrow.”

“Never mind that. We’re just glad to have you back.” She passed him a flute of champagne. “Are those the...”

“She’s called EDITH.” He drank it in a gulp and nearly lost the glasses, still unused to their weight on his face. “And yes, I know exactly how ridiculous they look. If I ever forget, I’m sure Guterman will remind me.”

Snow smiled nervously. “Are they recording?”

“Hey, EDITH. You spying on us?”

“Negative.” Smooth female voice in his ear. “All surveillance systems within twenty meters have been temporarily disabled, including my own.”

“I shouldn’t even be asking. The less I know, the better,” Snow said. “But we all deserve a night out. I hope _Mysterio_ has a toast ready.”

“Still not a fan of the name, then.”

“Not what I would have picked.” She shrugged. “But at this point I think you know what you’re doing.”

Yes. He knew exactly what he was doing. It was all going according to plan. Killsat glasses, good publicity, a kid getting his fondest memories crushed in a Las Vegas hospital. Because of the truth, wasn’t it? Maybe not literally, but in some fundamental sense that was _definitely_ Tony Stark’s fault...

“Everybody! Man of the hour’s here,” Snow said. “And I’m betting he’s learned to give a good heroic speech.”

The rest of them looked over. Snow raised her eyebrows expectantly, and Beck said the first thing he could think of.

“Of course — I mean, what are heroes for? But I’m not the inspiring one tonight. We all know who that is.” He raised the champagne and smiled. “A toast to our mutual muse and mentor: Tony _fucking_ Stark.”

Lincoln frowned and Riva watched him with a veteran’s thousand-yard stare. Only G clapped, and she did it with that dangerous bared-tooth grin. Well, he’d misread the room on that one.

“Okay, seriously. We know what we did here, but let’s say it anyway. To Bill: you built an acoustic weapons system better than anything Stark ever made.”

Riva’s posture loosened.

“To Jan: you designed a costume that should be set up in the goddamn Met.”

Lincoln smiled.

“To Vicky: you are both literally and figuratively the only reason we’re standing here right now.”

Snow maintained an investor’s inscrutable look of amusement.

“And to Guterman: you made up a story about an interdimensional soldier who was secretly a corporate test subject brainwashed into killing his own family by the biggest hero in the country, which is _totally psychopathic_ and also apparently somehow believable, god help us all.”

G clapped. But her grin stayed toothy and forced, her eyes firmly on empty space. Then again, how often did she look sincerely happy?

“Look, I don’t know what happens after the next fight. If you want to retire, everything can end there. If you want to keep going, we’ll figure out a way,” he said. "But no matter what — getting fired from Stark Industries was the best decision we never made." And G raised her drink along with the rest of them before coming over.

***

“No like I’m serious, how much of our mail have you read with the glasses?” G asked.

It was nearing midnight, and most of the crew had drifted away. Going upstairs had been G’s idea. Beck might have thought better of it, but the world had come gently unstuck sometime after he stopped counting his drinks, and her conversation was a sharp point holding it in place. Now he was meditating uneasily on the ammonia spice of a hotel room’s air-freshener and the pattern of well-worn parquet floors, trying not to notice G’s body heat or the scent of her hair.

“I told you. None!” Beck said. “I respect your privacy.”

“Man, I’m just saying. Fascism is the —”

“— the natural, um… natural immune response to... digesting power.” Beck’s tongue tripped over the words. “You’ve said it before.”

G’s laugh had an edge. “Sorry. I kinda figured you forgot everything about me.”

“Okay, come on,” Beck said. “I’m too drunk to figure out how guilty you want me to feel.”

“Don’t need your guilt. Just saying. Seems like you moved on.”

She lay back and anchored her bare feet against his leg. He felt flesh and bone through the thin linen of his dress suit. It seemed so wrong now, wearing anything but _the_ suit. It would have seemed wrong even if he weren’t technically in bed with a woman he’d spent so long trying to leave.

“Hey, G,” he said. “Is your name Virginia?”

And just like that, the paranoia slipped back. It was _why_ he’d left, after all — the suspicion that every moment with G was engineered to probe some dark Freudian weakness or spike some subliminal oxytocin rush.

Any writer might have added real details to the dossier about Quentin and Virginia Beck’s brief, tragic courtship — the online conversations, the Odinson shelter-in-place. But with G he was stuck wondering if they were meant to prime him into remembrance, aiming for a moment just like this one. And she’d never confirm or deny it, because pointlessly elaborate manipulation was — in the words G might have chosen — a good brand. Better a mastermind than a sad girl.

“For fuck’s sake, it was Stark’s wife’s name,” she said. “Did you really miss that one?”

“No, no I mean… it could be —”

“Both? If you wanna add that bit of improbably grim poetry to your life, Quentin, be my fucking guest.”

Beck had a quip ready, but he lost it to the head-splitting growl of a truck outside. He felt for the gin they’d appropriated from downstairs. G half-rolled off the bed and got to it first.

“Join me?” she said from the floor.

She took his hand and pulled him down. The room tilted at Dutch angles; the world recolored itself — cool blue to sickly yellow. G slipped the glasses back over his eyes, her hands hot against his skin, face inches from his own.

“You never answered me,” she murmured.

“About…”

“Why you’re doing all of this.”

G’s fingers touched his face again. She smelled old-fashioned, like a woman from another century, preserved in that dark house. She could preserve him alongside her, and all he had to do was reach out.

Beck lifted the gin and stared at its label, trying to make sense of the words and symbols — they looked bold and expensive and made his head hurt. “Not… not yet,” he said. “I’ll trade you answers.”

He closed his eyes and let the world spin. G’s fingers hit his hairline, brushed his ear. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“I want… want to know...” If he opened his eyes, he’d have to face G and lose his nerve. “I want to know. What were you doing before our plan?”

He expected her to laugh it off, ignore him, grab the bottle again. Instead, her fingers and the warmth of her skin receded.

“I can’t show you much of it. It’s… confidential and shit.” G dragged her netbook from a corner and opened it up, tapping through the file system. “But it’s like… you ever seen these?”

She guided his hand to the trackpad and clicked a file through his fingers. The document opened, showing white space and letters printed in gunmetal gray:

_Tony Stark’s Cave: DECODED._

He couldn’t quite focus on the words below that, but he remembered them well enough from outside the tower in Midtown. And after dozens of hours poring over Mysterio dossiers, they felt terribly familiar.

“You wrote this?” he said.

“About half. The rest’s copy-pasted from forums.” She ran her fingertips over his nails, as though the gesture might translate into the pad below. “Like I didn’t _invent_ the theory, let’s be I mean like, clear on that. But I’m probably why you heard about it.”

“Why?”

“I thought you were generally familiar with the concept of capitalism.” She snort-laughed and took a swig of gin. “They call it _alternative information consultancy_.”

“Who does?”

“Politicians, sometimes. Dubai oil money right now. They got to New York late, think hero conspiracy shit drives down real estate prices, and if they’re paying that’s good enough for me…”

She couldn’t mean that. He’d just drank his way past the threshold of anything making sense, or he’d let paranoia break his brain completely.

“That’s… Jesus, that’s really goddamn creepy.”

“Really?” she said. “You weren’t complaining about the psycho wife story a few hours ago.”

“That’s…”

G burst out laughing and shut the netbook with a snap, nearly catching his fingers. “Oh my god. Quentin. Were you really just going to say that’s _different_?”

He tried to put the pieces of a sentence together, but the words kept slipping out of his mind. “It’s… we didn’t have a choice,” he pleaded, finally. “They’ve got money, they’ve got connections. But nobody listens to people like us, G. You can be the smartest guy in the room, the most qualified, and no one cares. Unless you're flying around with a cape, or shooting lasers with your hands —”

“That is _such_ bullshit.” She had a hand around his wrist now, keeping them close, and her voice kept cracking into laughter. “You didn’t need some made-up story to play hero. Those fucking drones are as good as half the Avengers’ tech. _Not counting_ that weeaboo with the bow and arrows.”

He tried to pull away, but she squeezed so hard that her bones jabbed the tendons of his arm. “No no no no no. This is like, too fucking funny.” Her smile looked painful. “You don’t have money? Connections? Vicky handed you a check in like twenty minutes. No one _listens_ to you? People would fucking love you, if you could shut up about Tony Stark for five minutes. You’re this tall gorgeous fucking idiot with eyes I wanna fucking drown in —”

“Then why did you help me?” Beck asked.

G stopped laughing and let go of him. He fell back against the bed, briefly wondering if gravity had rotated and his head had hit the floor instead.

“Because playing a hero is bullshit too. And you were smart enough to see it,” she said. “You had the chance to be one of them. But no — you wanted to be like me. A cold fucking bastard.”

“That’s it? That’s all you wanted?”

“I don’t know what I want, Quentin,” she said. “I just know how to get it.”

“Well, _I_ just got sick of being pushed around, G. And I’m not hurting anyone.”

(Parker, hospital room: _They were hurting. And we killed them._ But that was different. Necessary pain; artists always use lies to tell the truth.)

Beck stumbled to his feet and yanked the door open. G called after him as he left.

“Hey — if there’s one thing you should have learned from Stark?” she said. “It’s that people never know who they’re going to hurt.”

***

Two days.

He’d owned EDITH for two days without committing any massive personal privacy violations. And now, sitting on the hotel's rough cement roof with his alcohol haze slowly turning to hangover, he was breaking that rule to feel like a good person again.

To _be_ a good person, Beck told himself. To see how Parker was taking the loss of a hero, so he could offer emotional support when he saw the kid again. And in any case Parker knew about the glasses, hell, he probably expected Beck to check in on him…

_Good person._

“I’ve tapped his ISP’s fiber throughlines and traced a connection to his address,” EDITH said. “Which data would you like to access?”

“Anything chat-related — his friends, SHIELD, anybody else he might be confiding in.”

“I could patch you to his videophone directly, if that would—”

“No!” Beck realized he was nearly shouting. “No, that isn’t necessary. I’m just making sure nothing’s wrong.”

“Very good. I’ll perform a sentiment analysis and alert you to any unusual topics of interest.”

He assumed she’d already done it — AIs could complete tasks faster than they could describe them. But she waited a beat before the results, as though trying to soothe his human ego.

“Parker exhibits increased agitation across several subject areas.”

“Such as?”

“The legacy of Tony Stark.”

_No surprises there._

“A currently platonic relationship with a classmate named Michelle Jones.”

_So that’s the girl._

“The origin of an unusual piece of projection technology.”

“Wait.” Beck rubbed his temples, feeling like he’d hit another sense-making threshold. “Projection technology?”

“The artifact was collected by Ms. Jones from the debris site of last week’s Las Vegas heroic altercation. A videophone still indicates markings consistent with older uncrewed aerial vehicles produced by Stark Industries.”

That couldn’t be right. Someone would have told him if a drone went missing. Or they would if he hadn’t been off the grid after the show, at least — and if they hadn’t been working in a strange city at night, and if they hadn’t spent the hours afterward frantically planting evidence for a new cover story.

“What do they think it is?”

“Texts from yesterday suggest a connection with a business in downtown Manhattan: a hero-themed tourist attraction located near Times Square.”

No… it might be very much right. And they might all be damned already.

“Would you like me to patch into the facility’s local network?”

“Don’t bother. Just get me all his recent text and video logs. His friends’ too.” Beck stood, feeling suddenly very sober and very sick. “I’ve gotta see a man about a drone.”

***

Riva picked up his videophone on the first ping, eyelids red and hair greasy. “Is something wrong?” Beck was just cogent enough to remember that Riva answered every phone call this way. Beck just didn’t usually share his panic.

“Are we missing a drone?”

“Missing? Of course not.”

Maybe he was overreacting. Stark had plenty of drones, after all. But Riva continued.

“We got one damaged, though. Rock crushed the projector. Or knocked it loose, I guess. It’ll be fixed soon —”

“Bill, I am going to need some _extreme fucking precision_ in language right now. When you say 'crushed' and 'knocked loose', you mean…”

Riva rubbed at his eyes. “I mean it’s gone. No idea where or how.”

“And would there be any identifying marks on the missing section? Any insignia? Labels? Stored video data fragments?”

“I’d have to check one of the other drones. Why?”

“Not sure yet. But I think we’ve got an emergency. I’m going to look at some records —”

“I’ll be in the warehouse,” Riva said. “Ping me when you get there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Finally, someone has acknowledged that Jake Gyllenhaal is extremely hot. We can now return to our regularly scheduled psychological unraveling.
> 
> Up Next: Everything goes to hell, Part II.


	10. Shadowplay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He’d wanted to be the next Iron Man, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to convince people he was their only hope. Hell of a monkey’s paw wish, that one._

Part of him admired Parker. The kid was credulous, sure. But damn clever.

While Riva had catalogued the technical damage, Beck had pored over EDITH’s data trove, trying to figure out what had happened. Its surveillance was beautiful and terrifying: every video call, encrypted chat, and tablet satnav locator laid bare. That wasn’t even touching the killsat.

And Parker had simply made a lot of phone calls.

Search records showed the kid and his not-quite-girlfriend cross-referencing drone designs just after Vegas. They'd gotten close fits but no matches, guessed she’d found a prototype, and dialed auction houses posing as auditors. He'd confirmed a Stark Industries fire sale and passed the baton to the girl, who pulled her own social engineering tricks to grab the sales records. Headed up to Times Square, where the proprietor of AMERICA’S HEROES AND VILLAINS IN LIVING WAX had almost certainly remembered a repairman with too much money and a thing for projection drones.

If that weren't enough, Parker had _named_ Mysterio, hadn't he? If he remembered, he might have figured something was wrong even without the drone.

Then Riva had announced the worst part.

“It cached video.”

Beck almost wished Riva would berate him, so Beck wouldn’t have to do it to himself. Autodeletion was one of the hundred little things he’d never gotten around to coding. SHIELD and the kid and the propaganda plan had taken priority, and he’d left Riva working alone in the background. Now, he called the drones into their last configuration: hundreds of projectors blinking a glitch-art rendering of flame and iron, looping the final few frames of Mysterio’s sacrifice.

(Victorians thought retinas retained their owners’ last sight before death, Beck remembered — they’d torn out the eyes of murder victims and doused them in chemicals, looking for killers. He’d accidentally made their theory work.)

Riva circled the elemental.

“I think I found it.” His tone suggested an astronomer spotting an incoming meteor. “It’s… not good.”

Even in the jittery chaos, the gap was obvious. It overlapped a section of the elemental’s glittering face, leaving it transparent. But they could have gotten over that. The real threat was the missing patch of his avatar’s fishbowl head and glowing gloves.

“We…” Riva dug two fingers into his graying hair. “We are completely dead.”

“No. We are going to salvage this, because I don’t _want_ to be dead right now.” Beck fished the glasses out of his pocket. “EDITH, has Parker contacted SHIELD? His family? Literally any adults?”

“Surveillance indicates he has not.”

“Bill. Calm down. We just have to get ahead of this.”

Maybe Parker would make up an explanation that exonerated his new friend. And if he didn’t, who would believe him? Would Hill or Fury want to admit they’d been played? People didn’t want truth. They wanted confirmation. If that was wrong... Beck didn’t want to think about it right now.

Lincoln had taken long enough to get here, and G was still missing — but never mind that.

“Okay. Everybody.” Beck couldn’t tell if his voice was shaking, or if the sound was just distorted by his splitting headache. “Calling a team meeting.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” Lincoln said, trailing off into a fractured, high-pitched laugh. “Suppose I should be flattered you like the suit so much.”

It would have felt unnatural to _not_ change into it. The suit was impenetrable. Safe.

This was not insane.

“It’s perfect,” he told her. “And everything is going to be fine.”

“We’re not children,” Lincoln said. “The plan’s gone sideways, hasn’t it? As if it wasn’t mad enough to begin with.”

“The plan is fine. We’ve changed the story once. We’ll change it again. We’ll —”

He jumped at the warehouse door’s metallic clang. It was G, clutching her purse with both hands and stumbling slightly as she approached.

“No more changes,” she said.

Lincoln eyed her warily. “Why?”

“Because we’re straight out of _bloody chaaann-cesss, dah-ling_.” G started to swing the purse and stopped abruptly, gathering it to her chest. “I read our forum comments, you know? I wasn’t gonna be a downer tonight. But the truth is, _luv_: they’re barely buying this stuff as it stands. People love Stark. They don’t give a fuck about some new guy with a sob story.”

“All the more reason to try something new —”

“No!” G snapped. “You need goodwill to sell a hero. And after the Stark stunt, man — we’re fresh out. You can hang onto two stories and stay credible. Another one? You’ve got wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels...”

Behind them, the drones continued their frenzied dance. Riva was staring at them studiously, avoiding anybody else’s eyes. Beck wished he could do the same.

“I don’t see you coming up with a solution,” he told G. “You just want to wait for Parker to sell us out? Hope Fury’s nice about it? Doesn’t send us to the Raft —”

“I’ve got a solution.” G seemed to show all her teeth at once. “We kill the kid.”

Beck waited for a punchline that never came. Finally Lincoln spoke for him.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s simple. We move the last fight — tomorrow, Queens, wherever the hell he lives. You run a whole ‘I know you’re in there somewhere’ routine with the monster-best-friend. And when you give it an opening…” She pantomimed a punch and overbalanced, pulling herself back just before falling. “Parker makes a heroic sacrifice. Good exit for him, great motivation for Mysterio… everybody wins. Narratively speaking, I mean.”

“Narratively speaking.” Lincoln looked over at Beck. “Get her to be serious, why don’t you?”

G was serious, Beck realized. She had the open bafflement of someone who’d shared a good idea and failed to get applause.

“G, that’s not an option,” he said weakly.

“You sure about that? I don’t hear a whole lot of conviction.”

“I don’t give a damn what you hear. We’re not murdering a child.”

“Come on, what’s he got to live for anyway—”

The air cracked with the sound of Lincoln’s palm against G’s cheekbone. “That’s sick,” Lincoln muttered.

G touched her reddened skin lightly. “Well — Jan knows the score.” She brushed hair from her eyes and snapped the purse’s tarnished clasp, reaching for something inside. “This isn’t debate club.”

She dropped the purse, pointed a pistol at the hologram, and fired.

Her bullet melted into the mass of glitched frames. The image flickered, and a drone fell to the ground, its projector eyes still blinking feebly. “Just so you know it’s real,” she said. “So anyway. Quentin? Give me your hand.”

“What?”

She lifted the gun — a vantablack hunk of metal, freckled with rust along its seams. “I don’t want to _shoot_ you.” She raised it higher, leveling it with his exposed neck. Finally, Beck stretched out a palm. She stared at it with a drunk’s confused and hostile intensity. “In fact,” she said, “I think you’d better shoot _me_.”

Before he could move, she fitted his fingers around the grip. Its metal was hot and damp. He thought almost hysterically of dropping it, but the safety catch’s red dot glared at him — who knew how old the thing was, or even what it shot, god guns seemed almost _quaint_ post-hero but even half-delirious he could remember that there were no heroes here…

“Grip hard, both hands. It’s got kind of a kick. And you’ve gotta get it right… right here, see? Right against my damn o_cu_lar ca_vi_ty…” G looked up at him with a single visible eye, her hand wrapped around the barrel of the gun. “Okay? Now we can talk.”

Maybe this was a dream. Just a cavalcade of one ridiculous misfortune after another, until he’d wake up and realize that the worst thing he’d done was something like falling in bed with G…

“This isn’t some kind of dramatic gesture,” Beck said. “This is insane and stupid and you need to go home and sober the hell up.”

“It isn’t a gesture. It’s a chance,” said G. “Because if you don’t kill me, I’m going to tell everybody what you are.”

“I don’t know what twelve-dimensional chess you think you’re playing, but —”

“Quentin, I don’t have a clue how to play chess. And this is really, really easy.” She showed her teeth again. Her hand was trembling. “I’m gonna walk out of this room and give a tell-all interview to the first tabloid that picks me up. Then I’m going to publish every file on every forum on the net.”

“I _control_ the net now.”

“You think you can keep this down? People post what they want to believe, Quentin. And I’m the one who can give it to them. So _anyway_,” she said. “Either I do all that. Or… you can give the kid the glorious exit he deserves.”

She stopped, leaving Beck squinting down the pistol’s sights. It was an old-fashioned and ugly weapon, useless against a real armored suit or a dampening field. And it would be utterly, devastatingly effective. A bullet would tear into the jelly of her eye and burrow through her brain, with none of the sanitary, gee-whiz sci-fi of a laser or a sonic gun. None of a hologram’s impermanence. For all he knew he’d be picking pieces of her skull off the cement, mopping blood and skin-flecked hair —

Beck gagged and pitched forward as all the alcohol of the past hours went to his head. G hopped back and let him fall, gun staying in her hand like a freshly severed limb. She was silent as he choked back bile. Finally she knelt beside him and put a hand on his arm.

“You’re the smartest guy I ever met. You know that?” she said. “You’re just afraid of using it.”

She left the gun by his side. Riva swept up the drone.

***

He should have shot her.

Beck repeated the words to himself all night and past dawn, from the warehouse to the corner of a vacant construction lot in Queens. _You should have shot her._

EDITH had checked the net, but if G had been online since their meeting, he couldn’t find it. After a fruitless hour he’d slunk off, thrown up, and wordlessly joined Riva on the warehouse floor.

It would be an ugly fight full of recycled moves, clumsy animations. There’d been no time to record lines for the Berkhart narrative. Beck could barely remember the plotline — something about hunting down Parker’s friends in revenge, although the more he considered this the less sense it made.

And if it sold, the arc would never end. He’d be the hero who let Spider-Man die. Working off that moral debt would take years of fighting the actual psychopaths who invariably showed up in New York, because he’d wanted to be the next Iron Man, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to convince people he was their only hope. Hell of a monkey’s paw wish, that one.

Riva would stick around. Maybe he could win Lincoln back. G… maybe she really didn’t want anything except the illusion of control. And it was an illusion. They’d drawn power from the collective unconscious, and when he’d tried to change its course it had only flowed on, leaving him behind. People believed what they wanted. Against that, a lie was as useless as the truth.

G had fed other people’s desires until there was nothing left behind her mask. And _he_ could kill anything or hack anyone. Yet here he was, just a man desperately imitating a mirror.

His drones settled birdlike around the lot. In a few minutes they would assemble, and the scene would start. Beck picked up the tablet.

Its timeline planned for Parker’s arrival within twenty minutes. By arrival plus-ten, Mysterio avatar is bloodied and exhausted. Avatar begs a man named Berkhart to wake up and speak to him. Sand-creature hesitates. Slashes at Parker in cruel fury. EDITH missile strike micro-targets victim.

After that, the obvious clichés: anguished scream, laser blast, drones release ash flow during disintegration routine. Beck learns how a three-inch facial laceration from an unshielded rotor blade feels. Bystanders discover tastefully injured hero kneeling tearfully over young protege.

He swiped.

Second timeline option: divergence at plus-ten. Elemental attack trajectory shifts to Mysterio avatar. Animation sequence swapped to “grab.” Hopeless struggle, inspirational last words to young protege. Drones release ash flow during disintegration routine, cloak Beck to edge of illusion range. By the time the dust clears he’s long gone — bound for that mythical upstate forest alone.

Swipe.

Third timeline option: cloaking section removed from second timeline. EDITH missile strike micro-targets its owner. Dust clears on the shredded body of a man named Quentin Beck — remembered maybe as a hero, maybe as a fraud, and either way too dead to care. 

“If you provide some objectives I can calculate the relative efficacy of your options, Mr. Beck,” EDITH told him.

“Shut up, EDITH.”

Beck yanked the glasses off and tossed them on a crate, blinking hard until the world stopped looking jaundiced. His options were as predictable as the bullets in G’s pistol. He might as well pull it from his fid suit and play Russian roulette — though that was only for revolvers, wasn’t it...

_Overcomplication’s in your nature. Too late to change now._

He hit the shuffle function, shut his eyes, and placed his thumb on the launch switch. Once he started the routine there’d be no going back. It was like making choices in a schoolyard game: _Run, Die, Kill._ He laughed and realized there was no joke in it and laughed even harder at that. Because soon he would hit the switch and it might all be over —

He would hit the switch —

He would hit —

He hit the switch and opened his eyes.

Nothing had happened. No drones launching his great Battle of Queens. No Queens, either.

Not one that obeyed the laws of physics, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- [Optography!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optography)  
\- The nice thing about this premise is that I can translate my actual plot holes into fuckups by the characters themselves. Guess who almost forgot that Spider-Man named Mysterio?
> 
> Up Next: All the weird stuff happens.


	11. Mr. X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"What low-rent universe did you get dragged out of, anyway? You look like your plan’s going a whole lot worse than mine."_

The problem wasn’t just physics; it was the whole concept of space.

Reality had shrunk to a corridor and folded like a fan. The bare struts and gravel piles fractured, and their pieces drifted apart, no longer quite three-dimensional. Behind the seams, Beck saw metal and glass and open sky. And at the end of the corridor — a man. No, not a man. Himself.

Thank god. This really was a dream.

He’d drifted off in G’s room, or he’d taken some benzos back in Vegas, or he was sleeping off a robocop’s sucker punch back in his apartment. Now he’d reached the end of the line, the moment just before waking where all that dadaist dream-logic narrative imploded.

His doppelganger was wearing a fid suit too, although it looked thicker and more carefully tailored. Everything about him seemed a little brighter, a little neater. The double took in the corridor with a few frantic tilts of the head.

“Quit fucking around, Riva!” He tapped a heads-up visor, and Beck felt a pang of envy. Of course his dream-double would have better equipment. “Riva? Guterman? Christ, don’t tell me this thing is broken.”

Beck walked closer. The world behind his double swam into view. High bridge, city behind — European, maybe. Of course his double got to travel, too. It was all wish-fulfillment: a better version of himself, come to inspire or berate him.

His double swung a hand into Beck’s face and froze when it connected. “You’re physically here.” He reached out again and brushed stiff fingers against Beck’s cheek. Haptic sensation realer than any dream he’d ever had. “Riva, I don’t know how you got up here, but you’re gonna get us killed.”

“Hey, me, can we skip this part?” Beck said. “You know I’m not Bill, so just get to explaining whatever’s supposed to be going on —”

The double wrapped a hand around Beck’s throat, cutting off the words. But his eyes were wide behind the visor. Scared.

“Then what are you?”

Beck wrenched free. At least he hadn’t imagined himself much stronger. “We’re probably supposed to be from different universes,” he said.

His double reached out again, making a familiar drone-seeking sweep. He hit empty space. And he broke down — not screaming, Beck realized after a moment, but laughing.

“Oh my god. Oh my fucking god. I should have seen this coming.” He straightened up and looked into Beck’s eyes, ran a hand over his suit, cracked up again. “I thought it sounded ridiculous. But hey, why wouldn’t there be a multiverse? A purple alien erased half the universe. A Norse space god teamed up with a literal wizard to bring it back. Half our scientific laws are like _friendly suggestions_.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Thanos? Thor? Not ringing any bells?” The double’s smile faded. “But I guess Tony Stark still made it over. Because it looks like we’re running the same con.” He nodded at the fid suit. “What low-rent universe did you get dragged out of, anyway? You look like your plan’s going a whole lot worse than mine.”

Here came the lecture or the pep talk. No point lying to his own subconscious.

“I went too far. I thought I could trick people into anything. Now I’m about to either die or kill a teenager in cold blood —”

His double frowned. “Wait, you haven’t done that already?”

Beck hesitated. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Why would I?” he said slowly.

“Like, because it’s easy? I don’t know. We do what we have to.”

“You… killed him. Your world’s Peter Parker.”

“Once. Although apparently it didn’t take.” The double shrugged. “You know some spiders can’t die from fall damage? Turns out the same principle applies to getting hit by a train.”

“And you don’t feel bad about it.”

“What choice did I have? My brainless team let him find a projector. Besides, we wouldn’t be here if Stark hadn’t treated everybody around him like dirt. Anything that happens… I mean, we both know who to blame.”

His brain was playing a cruel joke, Beck told himself. Tapping his guilt, pouring it into this glib, plastic caricature. He didn’t sound like that. Whatever he did… well, he was decent about it. Took things seriously. Felt bad afterwards. Wasn’t that enough?

“Anyway, you’ve got a plan to kill him, right?” his double said. “Airtight? Good way out?”

“I… I think so.”

“Then…” The double cast a glance backwards. “I could do it for you.”

“How does that work, exactly?”

“I assume we’re not stuck here forever. Why not switch places? I love a good challenge.”

The double put out a hand and smiled, but his casual tone sounded forced. Beck looked past him and noticed a shadow in the background — a roaring cloud with a face. He eyed the double again.

“I know when I’m lying,” he said. “At least tell me what’s going wrong back there.”

“Nothing you can’t handle. Hey, tell me what your world’s like! No Thanos… must be nice.”

So the dream was safely back in therapy mode. “We had a Thanos. He left a million people in a coma. For a year.”

“That was all?”

“What do you mean, _all_? It was the worst bioterror attack in history. He wanted to kill half of…” The double’s earlier words sank in. _A purple alien erased half the universe._ His brain really was fucking with him. “Your version actually did it. He destroyed half the world.”

“For a few years. They came back. No harm, no foul.”

“No harm.”

“Honestly, it’s amazing how fast people bounce back from this stuff.” He took another glance back. “Do we have a deal?”

The cloud was an elemental, Beck realized — not one of his own illusions, but an impossible monster spanning the river. Everything there must be weirder, more powerful, more ambitious. 

Why not take it? His double would kill Parker without a second thought. He’d charm Hill and Fury. G would love him. And whatever was waiting on the bridge, it had to be better than Queens. Even if it was just a dream.

But if it was a dream… where else could he be a hero, these days?

“No.”

The double rolled his eyes. “Is it the aliens?”

“I don’t want you to kill him,” Beck said. “I don’t want anybody to kill him.”

“So you’ll just sit back and wait for SHIELD to get the handcuffs. That’s pathetic —”

A patch of reality buckled. The world had gotten a little narrower. 

“It probably is.” A tinnitus hum began somewhere at the edge of reality, and Beck’s double winced at the same time he did. “I’m just… I’m so tired. So sick of being what people ask for.”

The double reached for a suit pocket. Beck didn’t realize what was happening until a pistol was pointed at his head.

“Then stop. Walk out to that bridge, and you can be whatever the hell you want. But don’t drag me down with you.”

Beck raised his hands in submission. Even the gun looked better. And he didn’t stand a chance of reaching for his own.

_Is this really how you let it end?_

Numbly, he let the double wave him down the corridor. He could hardly think through the humming. Any moment now he would wake up... and be stuck knowing that he was still a coward when nothing was at stake.

Reality crunched like a tin can, and the double looked up in alarm. Beck wasn’t going to get another chance. He rushed past the gun, grabbed the double’s shoulders, and hurled them both onto the bridge.

In a new world, a drumroll of gunfire sounded, and something slammed into his side.

***

Drones. Stark’s drones.

They’d fired the moment Beck hit the bridge with his double, punching neat holes in the fid suit and sending shockwaves through his flesh. The double rolled free and hugged the ground, while Beck groped for purchase on a glass wall. The bullets were like hornets hatching beneath his skin.

He looked down to judge the damage and saw blank space — the sensors had picked up his suit patterns, cloaking him in gray sky and busted metal. He nearly closed his eyes in relief, but someone was moving at the end of the glass passage, caroming through the maze of drones. Strange suit. No mistaking the Spider-Man mask. He’d stumbled all the way into another universe, and Peter Parker was somehow still going to destroy him.

The double’s eyes darted around the corridor. His fingers closed around the gun. Then something flickered, like a mistimed animation. The gun was gone, and in its place was a pair of familiar blue-tinted glasses.

Beck tried to keep his vision focused. The hornets had formed a nest, sending spikes of pain up his chest with every breath. Parker was nearly within arm’s reach. He kicked something invisible, and Beck hissed as a fragment of metal caught his neck.

The double grimaced and clutched his chest dramatically as Parker approached. It looked just as plastic as his smile earlier. But Parker still stopped, body language all concern. What else should Beck have expected from the kid? The double leaned closer and whispered something, twisting his face into a mask of contrition. He offered the glasses.

Or aimed the gun. Depending on perspective.

Parker wouldn’t have spotted the flicker. It was amazing enough that he’d gotten past the drones at all. And Beck might not have been able to hear the double, but he recognized the playbook. Everybody let their guard down to catch a dying moment of redemption.

Night was falling — no, not night, just the creeping dark of unconsciousness. If he closed his eyes he could miss this whole hideous scenario. Although if this weren’t a dream he probably wouldn’t wake up again. He’d be dead from his wounds or the double’s gun, because once the man shot Parker he’d come find Beck to finish him off… 

But G’s pistol was still digging into Beck’s ribs, and nobody seemed to see him. He unzipped the fid suit by inches, stopping every time the pain threatened to white out his vision. Blood had wicked its way up his shirt, but the gun was still dry. He fumbled it out and clenched its hot metal grip with both hands.

Parker was already reaching to take the glasses. If he got any closer he’d block the shot —

The kid’s head snapped up. He looked straight at Beck.

“I’m not falling for that.”

The kid had seen him. That wasn’t possible.

Beck had just enough time to internally register his disbelief. Then Parker had a hand around one wrist and _god_ he was fast and the double’s glasses had evaporated into gunmetal and

_Click._

Bang.

The double jerked back, his round ricocheting off steel as Beck fired. Parker’s grip went lax in surprise, and Beck kept shooting until his hands stung with the recoil. At some point his ears stopped ringing and he realized that there were no bullets left — only the click of the trigger, over and over, and an inert body that looked just like his own.

“Sorry,” he said.

He crumpled.

It was nothing like the fight in Vegas. His body was cooling meat, numb and distant, and Parker wasn’t begging him to wake up. There wasn’t anybody to cheer for him or film his sacrifice.

He wasn’t even wearing the damn cape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I remembered about midway through this that there is in fact a movie about Jake Gyllenhaal fighting his doppelgänger.  
\- Most of this story was actually inspired by two articles, [one of which](https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/8/20679946/spider-man-far-from-home-avengers-endgame-blip-thanos-snap-continuity-problems-mcu-marvel) is about _Far From Home_ essentially ignoring the Snap. [The other](https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/spider-man-far-from-home-mysterio-is-a-self-aware-baddie.html) is about Mysterio as a genre-savvy villain.
> 
> Up Next: Let's wrap things up.


	12. The Passenger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Here, things seemed to simply work out._

Quentin Beck woke shackled to a hospital bed.

He’d been there nearly a week now, counting the day he’d spent unconscious, according to a nurse. She’d left a few minutes after he started talking, hissing that he should be rotting in the Raft. This turned out to be one of the kinder assessments of Mysterio.

A version of Hill and Fury had visited the day after. He hadn’t bothered telling them anything but the truth — he barely understood what had happened, let alone a version of it that would sound convincing. They’d exchanged a glance that looked more like fatigue than disbelief.

The next day a pair of uniformed men had unlocked the handcuffs and eased him out of bed. Beck had prepared for agony but realized that he felt almost human again, even through a blanket of painkillers. He’d mumbled answers to SHIELD’s questions for an hour, picking through names and pictures of Stark ex-employees. William Riva, Janice Lincoln, Victoria Snow. A Guterman in this world, but male, British. He’d never learn G’s name now.

They rewarded him with books and newspapers and preselected videotube uploads. (_YouTube videos_, he reminded himself.) Things to be charmingly surprised by: working cellular networks. A New York City that still seemed alive. Superpowers.

God, superpowers. Terrifying, intrinsic abilities handed out by labs and sorcerers or generated by a quirk of genetics. Beck should have loathed it — except that here, things seemed to simply _work out._ Billions of people had disappeared with a neat snap of the fingers, and the rest had somehow carried on. Aliens, hyperintelligent robots, Norse space gods… this whole place was built to fuck with his understanding of reality. And yet everyone seemed to deal with it.

Most of it, at least. SHIELD hadn’t released his double’s body. Newspapers correctly reported that a Quentin Beck had been extradited from London with a couple of bullet wounds and a few dozen criminal charges. “People can’t take any more layers to this mess,” Hill explained almost apologetically. “We’ll try clearing things up in a few months, if Fury decides he believes you.”

Beck hadn’t asked whether Parker believed him, and he hadn’t asked to see him. From news reports and Fury’s hints, he guessed that his double had actually done worse than simply push the kid in front of a train. He’d flipped between the two inevitable responses to hearing someone else’s sins: _At least I wasn’t that awful_ and _Could I have been that awful?_

He still wasn't quite sure what had happened, let alone why — the universe conspiring to do _something_ to him, he supposed, assuming he wasn't dreaming. If it shuffled its deck again, sent him back to the moment of his departure, which story would his drones be running? And if it was the original, where Parker’s number came up… would he go through with it? A good person could have answered that. Beck wouldn't dare.

He almost wished they’d come interrogate him again.

Footsteps clicked in the hallway. It was Hill, looking fractionally less exhausted than before. She put a tray of food by his free hand.

“You look better.”

He picked up a waxy apple and rubbed his thumb over its surface. The check had become a ritual: _it still feels real._ Still tasted like sweetened mud, too. This reality hadn’t made the Red Delicious any better.

“Besides going crazy alone in here, yes.”

“Sorry. Fury’s a little paranoid about you. I don’t blame him.” Beck finished the apple, and Hill watched him with the eyes of someone scrutinizing a magician’s trick or a hologram. “You’ve got a visitor, though. If you approve it.”

“Who?”

“Peter Parker.”

Beck stared at his fingers while he carefully rubbed the apple’s juice off them.

“Do you want to see him or not?” Hill asked.

“Yeah.” He looked up. “It’s just… what exactly does he think I am?”

“I don’t think he’s sure yet,” she said. “He knows you helped him. He doesn’t know why.” She stared at him again in a long, uncomfortable silence. “Sorry if I’m overstepping here. But… I get the feeling you don’t either.”

He started to protest. But he wasn’t angry, he realized. Only relieved at not having to choose the right mask for her.

“So what do I tell him? What does he want to hear?”

“Don’t tell him what he wants to hear,” Hill said. “Tell him who you want to be.” She thumbed a message on her phone. “He’ll get here in a second. I’ll be just in the hall.”

Hill left quietly. A fly was circling the apple core, and Beck followed its path with his eyes, keeping still until it landed. As it explored the fruit’s soft and skinless remains, the door opened again.

Curtains up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- All right! That's it for (eventually, nearly accidentally) good guy Quentin Beck. He escaped to a less miserable universe _and_ his anchor hero isn't getting kicked out of the MCU anymore. Good timing on that one.
> 
> Up Next: Wait for it...


	13. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What would an MCU fanfic be without a post-credits sequence?

The woman in the black jumpsuit found Peter on the subway platform. He couldn’t remember her name, but he recognized her. She’d been one of Mysterio’s superfans before the man had disappeared.

_Disappeared_ was too kind. Quentin Beck had been a fraud. He’d found people’s weak points and rooted a lie in them, and it had worked — he’d convinced Peter to give up the last thing Mr. Stark had trusted him with. Then he’d run. A news crew had discovered Mysterio’s hologram drones in Peter’s own neighborhood, tipped off by an anonymous source. The glasses weren’t with them.

The woman’s blond hair was frayed, and the space under her eyes was hollow. She looked threadbare — a canvas scraped clean too many times.

“Hey kid. Come talk a minute.”

“I’m not a kid,” he snapped. He regretted it immediately. She probably felt just as betrayed as him. “Sorry. You… you must be...”

“I’ll be okay.” She patted the bench beside her. “Not the first time a hot guy walked out on me.”

“Do you have any idea where he went?”

“Not a goddamn clue.”

Peter didn’t think she was lying. He was getting a knack for sensing those things — too late, of course. “I really believed him,” he said. “Even what he said about…”

“About Tony Stark? Yeah. Kind of why I’m here.” She scoured her purse and pulled out a cheap plastic case. “For you.”

He took the case with his flesh hand — the Oscorp arm was locked up at home, and the light plastic prosthetic never felt right these days. When he opened it, his breath caught in his throat. The glasses were scuffed and chipped along the edges. But they still lit up as he pressed them to his eyes.

“Where did you get these?”

“Drone site. Guess the cops missed them,” she said.

Now _that_ part was a lie.

“And how did you know…” He stopped. “Never mind. I can’t thank you enough for this.”

“Least I could do.” She smiled and met his eyes. “Peter, can I give you some advice?”

He looked at the station clock. “I guess so.”

“Give up the hero thing, okay?”

He nearly dropped the glasses. Beck must have told her — and maybe not just her.

“Hey. Calm down,” she said. “I won’t snitch. I’m just here to tell you: some things are gonna change.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and me know Quentin was a goddamn liar.” The woman smiled wryly. “But some people — they’ll never trust in Stark again. And a lot more… they won’t know what to believe.”

“So?”

“Soon they’ll trust every single one of you a little less. And when the next fake shows up, it’ll happen even faster. Until you can put on the fanciest suit, catch all the purse-snatchers you want, but nobody’s gonna cheer.” She paused to click a scarred hunk of plastic, put it to her chapped lips, and blow a neat vapor ring into the air. “I mean, it was gonna happen anyway — but Quentin sure sped it up,” she told him. “The end of heroes, kid. It’s the whole fucking zeitgeist.”

“That’s not true.” He took the glasses off and balanced them gently in his articulated palm, trying to remember how they would have looked on Mr. Stark. “And if it is I don’t care. I don’t do this because it makes people like me.”

“Don’t say I didn’t put the writing on the wall.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I think you’ll come through it. You’re smart. And when you figure out what to do next… maybe I can help. I do publicity, you know?”

Something in her posture unsettled him. He got the sense of a lazy predator waiting for a meal — anything at all, as long as she could hold it fast and bleed it dry.

“Look, I’ve got class,” he said. “But if you want to give me a net ID or an address or something…”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “When you really need me, I think I’ll find you.”

The approaching train would have drowned out any of Peter’s questions. He put the glasses back in their case and clutched it tight — and by the time the doors opened, the woman was already gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I’m not sure how I started with “I should give the protagonist a pre-existing relationship” and got “wandering superhero svengali,” but here we are. Somebody give me a Marvel deal and I’ll write _The Zeitgeist Set: It’s Another Civil War_, in which Guterman and Maria Hill play a cat-and-mouse game over the future of heroes with Spider-Man caught in the middle.  
\- If you’ve been thinking "these chapter names seem sort of abstract and are also the titles of punk, post-punk, and New Wave songs from the ‘70s and ‘80s" — look, I needed some kind of naming framework. [There is actually a playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/53DAvM7p5iHsVArWQpIgCu)
> 
> Anyway, that's it. Thanks to everyone who read and especially commented; it's been fun talking.


End file.
